08 Postdoctoral Fellowship at Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Are you an enthusiastic young scientist who likes to work with and/or develop new spectroscopic instruments? And do you hold a PhD degree in physics (photonics), electrical engineering or a related field? Would you like to be involved in the research and development of instruments based on the latest ultrabroadband, mid-infrared, intrapulse difference-frequency generation source to perform multispecies detection in demanding applications  as in environmental monitoring, exposure assessment and the green hydrogen industry? If so, then you have a part to play as a postdoctoral researcher in our research team.

Are you an enthusiastic young scientist who likes to work with and/or develop new spectroscopic instruments? And do you hold a PhD degree in physics (photonics), electrical engineering or a related field? Would you like to be involved in the research and development of instruments based on supercontinuum IR sources to perform multispecies detection for life science applications? If so, then you have a part to play as a postdoctoral researcher in our research team!

Do you want to conduct research on the legal framework for digital identity wallets? As a Postdoctoral Researcher, you will focus on the requirements for the revision of the electronic IDentification, Authentication and trust Services (eIDAS) regulation, and the potential conflict with other regulations.

In broad terms, the research is concerned with green finance; energy partnerships and trade; investment strategies; and material infrastructure as they relate to the EU’s plans to diversify its energy supply and achieve energy security and decarbonisation by 2050 in compliance with the European Green Deal (EGD). Within this thematic scope, this research is concerned with the extra-territorial repercussions of the EU’s energy policy and energy trade, as well as with emerging energy frontiers, specifically the green hydrogen frontier. The research will focus on plans to export green hydrogen from South Africa to the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Hence, this research puts emphasis on the South Africa-Netherlands energy relations during current green energy transitions and connects this focus to the wider enduring colonial legacies of the EU.

In your postdoctoral position, you will conduct this research independently, including the anticipated fieldwork in South Africa (and possibly at other locations) in relation to the overall research theme on EU energy externalities. You will collaborate with Dr Noura Alkhalili, who will conduct fieldwork in the Netherlands (and the EU more broadly), paying special attention to the port of Rotterdam. Dr Noura Alkhalili’s work focuses on themes of energy externalities, energy imperialism, green extractivism, coloniality and energy justice. Based on your fieldwork, and in collaboration with Dr Alkhalili, you will engage with critical, timely and decolonial conceptual frameworks to unpack the export of green hydrogen from South Africa to the Netherlands. You will also work in collaboration with Dr Alkhalili to co-author publications, organise workshops and convene panels at academic conferences.

The project is funded by an incentive grant and will be supervised by Dr Harry Pettit. The project aims to examine the role of changing infrastructures of money circulation in mediating social relations and inequalities. In many economies across the world, there has been a dramatic shift towards digitalised cashless payment systems. However, this transition is far from uniform. Many governments are promoting policies to protect the use of cash, while in some contexts cash is resurging due to failures in banking and digital payment systems.

The means by which money circulates through the economy has a huge impact on social justice. However, there remains a scarcity of knowledge regarding the consequences of the physical and digital infrastructures of money. How do these infrastructures transform relations between different economic actors? What forms of extraction and exploitation, alongside resistance and survival, are opened up by physical and digital infrastructures of money circulation? 

As a postdoctoral researcher, you will contribute to a highly collaborative ERC-Synergy project with the ambitious goal to crack a hundred-year-old mystery and a major medical challenge: how malaria parasites stay dormant in the liver and how they ’decide’ to reactivate themselves, causing relapse infections. To answer this question we will combine a unique relapse infection model with state-of-the-art omics, gene editing and imaging technologies in a highly collaborative setting. We need your expertise in applying and integrating various omics approaches (single-cell and spatial transcriptomics, epigenomics, proteomics) to identify host factors enabling dormancy of the parasite or influence their reactivation. Furthermore, we provide a highly conducive environment for you to thrive and to develop novel ideas and work on additional independent projects that align with this research theme.

Project 1: Better survey measures for factual beliefs
There is currently a lack of well-validated survey measures for factual beliefs. For fundamental questions such as whether people overestimate the magnitude of the immigrant population, our current knowledge relies on insufficiently validated items. Existing survey items have, for example, asked respondents about percentages, ratios, visual representations, or exemplars. Supervised by Dr Roderik Rekker, you will apply measurement models and survey experiments to examine whether some questions or response formats are easier to understand for survey respondents than others, and how such measurement decisions affect substantive conclusions about factual belief polarisation. This project will yield better validated survey items and articles in international peer-reviewed journals.

Project 2: The politicisation of trust in science, bias perceptions, and advocacy by scientists
Public trust in science is becoming increasingly politicised. Conservative and far-right voters, in particular, often express lower levels of trust in science. One possible reason for this politicisation is that citizens do not always accept science as a politically neutral epistemic authority. For example, sociologists are often seen as ‘left-leaning’, while economists are perceived as ‘right-leaning’. These perceptions of political bias are associated with distrust in the respective scientific fields. Together with Dr Roderik Rekker, Dr Erika van Elsas, and Dr Christel van Eck, you will use surveys and experiments to investigate where these perceptions originate and what their consequences are. In particular, the project will examine how citizens view different forms of policy advocacy by scientists, and if and when advocacy can contribute to perceptions of bias and public distrust.