11 Postdoctoral Fellowship at Utrecht University, Netherlands

Do you want to help developing AI technology to predict the health, resilience and immune responses of plants? Join us in understanding high dimensional image and genomic data on crops, such as lettuce. This position is a unique opportunity for you to apply your talent in AI to understand and improve the immune system of crops. You will help to make AI models that can make predictions on multi-modal data, in the form of complex high dimensional image and genomics data. These AI models will have the aim to predict (regulation of) plant health, plant immune responses, plant growth rates and plant physiological characteristics. You will develop a research line within a well-connected team of researchers as part of the AI Technology for Life 

This project is part of the transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary research programme SCOOP: Roadmaps to Resilient Societies (see https://www.scoop-program.org/  external link). SCOOP is a research and training centre dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of sustainable cooperation as a key feature of resilient societies. SCOOP brings together researchers of the University of Groningen, Utrecht University, VU Amsterdam, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Radboud University Nijmegen. The post-doctoral project is an integral part of a larger research cluster within SCOOP, known as the ‘Appeals to Moral Responsibility’ cluster. Within this cluster, there are three interrelated PhD projects that tackle the issue of external pressures often leading to defensive responses and potential backfiring when attempting to promote morally responsible behavior. The PhD projects aim to explore the adverse effects of current moral appeals for behavioural change and propose alternative approaches, such as incorporating games and humor, to stimulate intrinsic motivation in individuals. The ultimate goal of the PhD projects is to uncover the underlying mechanisms that engage individuals’ sense of moral responsibility, thereby promoting socially responsible conduct among both citizens and organizations. We believe that by understanding these mechanisms, we can develop more effective strategies for inducing positive behavioral change. For a comprehensive overview of the cluster of PhD projects, please refer to the detailed description available at: https://www.uu.nl/en/research/organisational-behaviour/vacancies 

This project aims to examine the history of reparations following mass human rights abuses through the utilisation of digital tools. It will analyse the personal diaries of a German jurist who dedicated a significant portion of his professional career to seeking reparations for Holocaust survivors. These diaries, previously inaccessible to researchers, contain meticulous daily notes. By employing and advancing handwritten-character recognition (HCR) technology, the Wording Repair project will provide valuable bottom-up insights that will contribute to the development of the emerging field of historical reparations studies.

In addition to the IMAGINE! consortium, you, as post-doctoral researcher, will become part of the highly interactive Cell and Developmental Biology community at Utrecht University. This will include daily interactions with fellow researchers in the van den Heuvel, Boxem and Ruijtenberg labs. Additionally, you will have the opportunity to collaborate with many other researchers within the Institute of Biodynamics and Biocomplexity including the Akhmanova, Kapitein, Baubec, and Ten Tusscher labs, as well as other researchers across the broader Utrecht University campus.

This project is part of a consortium effort and incorporates the latest technologies in transcriptome, epigenome, and proteome analysis. It involves close collaboration with specialists in single-cell analysis from the Korswagen and Van Oudenaarden labs at the Hubrecht Institute, proteomics techniques from the Vermeulen lab at Radboud University Nijmegen, and computational modelling from the Ten Tusscher lab at Utrecht University. You, as post-doctoral researcher, will become part of the highly interactive Developmental Biology community at Utrecht University. This will include daily interactions with fellow researchers in the van den Heuvel, Boxem and Ruijtenberg labs and with graduate students and post-docs who work on related topics with one of the consortium partners. Additionally, you will have the opportunity to collaborate with many other researchers within the Institute of Biodynamics and Biocomplexity including the Akhmanova, Kapitein, Baubec, and Ten Tusscher labs as well as other researchers across the broader Utrecht University campus.

The departments of Interdisciplinary Social Science and Social, Health and Organizational Psychology have an opening for a joint postdoc who will undertake participatory research to develop innovative strategies and tools that can successfully engage citizens in policymaking to mitigate major threats to contemporary societies. The postdoc will work across two research consortia and contributes to strengthening community engagement in pandemic preparedness and the sustainability transition. As part of the BePrepared consortium, the postdoc will lead a 12-month project concerned with community engagement in pandemic policymaking. The project includes a systematic review of prior research to identify factors related to effective engagement in policymaking. The outcomes of the systematic review guide the subsequent co-creation process to develop novel approaches for community engagement in pandemic decision-making. Promising approaches are evaluated in a usability assessment with community and other stakeholders.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is one of the most common lung diseases worldwide, and is characterized by an accelerated loss of lung function. A key problem underlying COPD is increased tissue destruction in combination with defective lung tissue repair. As current therapies do not modify the progression of the disease, new therapies aimed at restoring lung tissue repair in COPD need to be developed. The exacerbation period may offer an opportunity to overcome this problem. Lung function decline in COPD is highest in the period during and immediately following an exacerbation. Furthermore, the exacerbation appears to be a period characterized by both concentrated disease burden and simultaneous repair pathway activation. Therefore, we hypothesize that the COPD exacerbation represents a therapeutic window for lung repair.

Led by Dr. Ozan Ozavci (Principal Investigator), the Great Game of Pandemics project aims to write a new history of international health cooperation with a focus on sanitary internationalism in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in the long nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will investigate cooperative practices between global northern (European, American) and MENA actors (diplomats, doctors, merchants, missionaries, etc.) in the age of empires and high imperialism. The project investigates the relationship between global imperial interests of the so-called nineteenth-century Great Powers and perceived threats and interest calculations of local societies in MENA. It will look into the question of what enabled their cooperation in the fight against epidemics and pandemics and how the hierarchical nature of their relationship affected this cooperation. To address these questions, the project team will conduct research in several American, European, Middle Eastern and North African archives and libraries.