10 Postdoctoral Fellowship at Vrije University Amsterdam, Netherlands

The postdoc will conduct ethnographic research under the supervision of dr. Anastasia V. Sergeeva and will be based at the KIN Center for Digital Innovation at the Vrije Universiteit. KIN research focuses on the development, use and business value of innovative organizational processes and technologies. This research center is a home to a multi-disciplinary group of researchers, with academic backgrounds in business administration, sociology, communication science, anthropology, philosophy, engineering, and computer science. The research contributes to an international field that is relatively new and multi-disciplinary. We work closely together with faculty and researchers from other universities and cooperate with an extensive network of business partners.                

Our theory group is a worldwide leader in studying the statistical physics of living systems, ranging from chromosomes to migrating cells and multicellular tissues. We aim to understand the emergent functional dynamics and organization of living systems in close collaboration with various experimental labs. We currently have an opening for an ERC funded 3-year Post Doc position.

We are looking for highly motivated applicants with a PhD to strengthen our research team in an interactive and
collaborative environment.

The Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) has a new exciting position for a postdoctoral (PD) researcher in the field of environmental economics. You will join our interdisciplinary research team at IVM, which aims to enhance the implementation of nature-based solutions (NBS), thereby increasing resilience of society against climate change, biodiversity loss and other environmental pressures.

We have a large and growing portfolio of projects on NBS, and we are now seeking to expand our economic expertise on upscaling NBS through innovative financing and business models. You will need to seek and foster collaborations, and co-create knowledge with a wide variety of societal and research partners from these projects.

The PD project will closely collaborate and be supervised by Prof. Pieter van Beukering, Prof. Wouter Botzen, Dr Marije Schaafsma and Dr Mark Koetse.

A growing number of people works through platforms such as Fiverr, Uber, or UpWork. They are part of the platform, or gig, economy. The viability of the platform economy for workers is heavily debated. Proponents are excited about the independence and flexibility that platforms afford. Detractors of the platform economy instead emphasize that platforms help create situations of precarity and overall platform dependence.

At the root of those discussions lies the question of how much autonomy platform workers have over the work they do. However, beyond anecdotal accounts of platform workers, there is hardly any research on how workers actually behave on platforms. Without such insight, policymakers are in the dark about the exact impact of platforms on the work landscape. This postdoc project aims to generate such insight by conducting studies of actual worker behavior using platform data.

We are looking for a candidate to fill this postdoc position for a duration of two years. The postdoc will work under the supervision of dr. Joey van Angeren and dr. Mark Boons. The starting date is flexible throughout 2024 and will be agreed upon with the suitable candidate.

Despite decades of innovation, SERS-based sensing platforms seldom transition from proof-of-concept, academic demonstrations to applied, market-ready products. A key bottleneck is the lack of suitable read-out methodologies, where highly sophisticated SERS sensors are analysed by confocal Raman microscopes, one spot at a time. Over the past few years, we have taken initial steps towards providing better solutions (Nature Nanotech. 15, 1005 (2020) & Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 61, e202200072 (2022)). However, a broadly-applicable turn-key solution is still lacking but could revolutionise SERS-based sensing.

The VU FSW Societal Analytics Lab was founded to support social science scholars in using computational techniques. Computational social science offers a wide range of new opportunities for conducting innovative research, but leveraging these opportunities demands a unique set of skills, tools and resources that many social science researchers currently lack access to. The Societal Analytics Lab aims to bridge this gap by providing essential resources and support for both seasoned computational social scientists and those just beginning to explore these methods.

As a post-doctoral researcher at the VU FSW Societal Analytics Lab, you will be at the center of the computational social science wave. As a research engineer, you will create, maintain and facilitate research software, and be the expert on using advanced computational resources, such as the BAZIS compute cluster and our own hardware (e.g., servers, GPU nodes). As lab manager and open science champion, you fulfill a pivotal role in running and steering the lab. Together with the lab directors (Wouter van Atteveldt and Kasper Welbers) you will monitor new opportunities, arrange investments in new hardware, foster computational literacy among researchers through tutorials and workshops, and help FSW scholars in integrating computational techniques in their research and grant proposals.

A 3-year full-time PostDoc student position is available at the Knowledge in Artificial Intelligence (KAI) group of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, in close collaboration with ASML Veldhoven. The successful candidate will investigate Knowledge Representation and Engineering challenges as part of a close collaboration with ASML on the usage of knowledge intensive methods for Diagnostic Reasoning.

Diagnostics of large Cyber-physical systems is a highly complex process involving both (sensor and other quantitative) data about the machines, as well as rich sources of highly diverse knowledge, that comes in form of tribal knowledge, expert knowledge, design knowledge, documentation and formal specification, and present in numerous different modalities, such as texts, table, diagrams and very often simply in the heads and folklore of the experts. In order to reason about system failures, we need to model this knowledge formally to make it suitable for (diagnostic) reasoning.

Serial Crystallography (SX) is an emerging method that allows visualizing the macromolecule interaction with light. SX is a so-called “pump–probe” experiment, where a short UV-Visible light laser pulse excites the chromophores in the molecule while an X-ray pulse is used to probe the newly formed state at a  certain delay after light excitation. As a result, the light-induced X-ray crystallographic electron densities are assigned to reactions and excited-state processes. Postdoctoral research position in SX and dynamic structural biology is available to study light inducible proteins essential for photosynthesis and photobiology. The SX results would be complemented by time-resolved spectroscopy.The position is available now for a minimum of one year, with the possibility of extension.

This project offers a unique opportunity for interdisciplinary and international collaboration, particularly with the Radboudumc Biomaterials research group and several industry partners.The candidate, alongside our team, will be responsible for research on infection model development, investigating resistant mechanisms and assessing the effectiveness of the novel drug carriers.

The candidate will be situated within the Department of Preventive Dentistry, specialized in microbiological aspects of dental research. The department comprises researchers experienced in various fields: clinical dentistry, molecular biology, microbiology, microbial ecology and bioinformatics and regularly hosts international PhD students and postdoc researchers. This fostering a supportive and intellectually stimulating working environment.

The candidate will be enrolled in the Graduate School of ACTA, University of Amsterdam. Besides this vacancy for a Postdoc we also have a vacancy for a PhD candidate.