05 Postdoctoral Fellowship at Utrecht University, Netherlands

The FLOW consortium consists of 14 group leaders spread across 5 different cities in the Netherlands: Utrecht, Leiden, Groningen, Enschede and Nijmegen. Together they represent a wide range of expertise forming a diverse group of researchers. The consortium includes 6 female group leaders and several of the consortium members have their roots outside of The Netherlands. The group leaders are: Ineke Braakman (lead), Stefan Rüdiger, Arnold Boersma, Peter van der Sluijs, Friedrich Foerster (Utrecht), Mireille Claessens (Twente), Mark Hipp, Kasia Tych, Harrie Kampinga (Groningen), Alfred Vertegaal, Monique Mulder, Anne Wentink (Leiden), and Martijn Huynen, Evan Spruijt (Nijmegen).

We are looking for a candidate who has proven experience with mechanical testing and nano-indentation techniques, as well as proven experience with electron microscopy for post-measurement imaging and sample characterisation. You must have successfully completed a PhD programme in Earth Sciences, Materials Science, Engineering or a related discipline by the time the position starts.

You will complement our team, which currently consists of 3 PhD candidates and the PI. The team explores interactions between the arts of the Netherlands and the world beyond Europe in an attempt to establish how Netherlandish art has contributed to a global worldview. Whereas the PhD projects all take historical approaches (such as iconography and technical art history), you as a postdoc will focus on the recent past and contemporary period. The central research question is how and why paintings from the seventeenth-century Netherlands have been collected and displayed in museums in Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the period 1975-2022. You will also contribute to an exhibition that connects the project’s historical questions to topical societal debates.

Mountains are the water towers of the world. They receive a disproportionately large amount of precipitation due to orographic lifting. The most important water towers are Asia’s mountain ranges, particularly the Himalaya, the Karakoram and the Pamir. These mountains contain the largest ice reserves beyond the polar regions and are therefore often collectively referred to as the Third Pole.

Here, mountain precipitation feeds glaciers and snowpacks, generating river flow that supplies major reservoirs and sustains millions of people downstream. At the same time, extreme mountain precipitation triggers floods, landslides, debris flows, and avalanches. Without understanding the drivers and magnitude of mountain precipitation, quantifying the mountain water cycle is virtually impossible. You will work as a team member in the ERC Advanced project DROP, which focuses on understanding how mountains, land-surface feedback, and large-scale atmospheric circulation control the distribution of mountain precipitation in time and space on the Third Pole.

In this postdoc project, you will develop clean water and energy transition pathways, jointly with key stakeholders at a regional and global scale. You will develop methodological frameworks for stakeholder participation to quantitatively explore trade-offs in stakeholder defined objectives and possible management actions under unknown future water-energy resources and climate states. You play a leading role in organising stakeholder workshops.

In this role you collaborate closely with another postdoc researcher (background in water-energy resources modelling), the PI and staff members on developing spatially explicit clean water and energy transition pathways that are robust under increases in droughts and heatwaves.