12 Postdoctoral Fellowship at University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

The aim of this project is to enhance our understanding of how (climate) science has been used, and can be used, in the development, interpretation and application of international legal rights, obligations and procedures (including litigation) that are relevant to climate change. It examines how scientific knowledge that helps us understand climate change – including its causes, impacts, future risks and mitigation – and which is traditionally produced outside of the legal discipline, can be incorporated into, or used by, international law.

Do you want to understand efforts to help people in low-income countries deal with climate change? Are you interested in developing new methodologies to “follow the money” associated with such efforts? Do you want to generate insights relevant for climate change policy and the global movement for climate justice?  

The Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is looking for a postdoctoral researcher to join the project “ClimateFiGS: Understanding the Allocation of Climate Finance in the Global South.” The project is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and led by Dr. Ruth Carlitz.

The impact of climate change on people’s lives and livelihoods is increasingly hard to ignore and is moreover characterized by trenchant inequities. In response, wealthy nations have pledged to mobilize US$100 billion annually in “climate finance” to help their more vulnerable counterparts. The past decade has seen climate finance double, but we know very little about what happens when these resources reach their intended beneficiaries in the Global South. As such, we lack information about where and how climate finance can have the greatest impact, and what constitutes the greatest areas of unmet need.

The Department of Anthropology at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is seeking a Research Assistant for two years for the project ‘Time to pay up? Reparations and global development challenges’ (REPAIR).

The REPAIR project studies empirically how reparations payments are justified, made and received around the world. Our research team consists of the principal investigator (PI) Dr Felix Stein, a PhD candidate, a postdoctoral researcher, a junior researcher (this could be you!), and an administrative assistant.

Together, we will ask:

1. When and how reparations are established, paid and received in international development settings.
2. What that teaches us about international development from a moral, political and economic perspective.
3. How the global push for reparations challenges existing economic thought and practice.

Are you interested in international development, climate change and debates around loss and damage? Can you conduct ethnographic research in a setting where people are affected by climate change and call for reparations? Do you want to push the boundaries of economic thought and practice? Then this job may be for you.

In this project an interdisciplinary team of (environmental) chemists and data scientists at the University of Amsterdam will tackle these challenges together with a network of external partners from academia, regulation and industry. We propose a data-driven approach towards simplifying the suite of chemical additives used in plastics to support the development of Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design (SSbD) polymeric materials. We will develop advanced computational tools to make use of the 3D structure of chemical additives to score them according to specific SSbD criteria, while taking into account the polymer functionality. The final goal is to generate a short-list of safe chemical additives covering a range of key functions which can be used as to formulate simplified and harmonized plastic formulation across a wide range of application sectors. Finally, these models will be applied to the chemical space outside of the known plastic additives to identify potential novel SSbD plastic additives. 

The focus of this postdoc position is to examine how, when and why children shift from associative reasoning to successful analogy solving across various domains (e.g., verbal and visual). The aim is to identify the phases children progress through when learning to solve analogies and to identify mechanisms that enable children’s transition to successful analogy solving. Then, in collaboration with the project team, we can perhaps translate these mechanisms to AI models to help enable analogical reasoning in these systems.

The main research tasks will include organizing data collection with children (in person and online with Prowise Learn), creating and/or adapting computational models of analogy solving development, and complex statistical analyses including latent Markov modeling (latent transition analysis) and longitudinal analyses (e.g., latent change score models).

Applications are invited for a postdoctoral position at the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy (API) at the University of Amsterdam Netherlands (UvA) to work with Assistant Professors Silvia Toonen and Antonija Oklopčić on dynamical and atmospheric evolution of exoplanets. The primary responsibility of the position is to lead research projects that connect the architectures and dynamical histories of planetary systems with the properties and evolution of their atmospheres. We seek a curiosity-driven researcher with an interest in interdisciplinary work and exploring as-yet untapped regimes of exoplanet studies. Candidates with a background in atmospheric and/or dynamical modeling are encouraged to apply, and we are also open to other areas of expertise within astrophysics.

As a Postdoctoral Researcher, you will play a central role in leading and conducting original experiments, computations, and/or theoretical research within the Machine Materials Laboratory and the Fluidlab. Your responsibilities will encompass the design and construction of innovative experimental setups, as well as the comprehensive collection, analysis, and interpretation of experimental data, supported by the mathematical and computational modelling of nonlinear dynamics. Your findings will be disseminated through peer-reviewed manuscripts and conference presentations.

We highly value mentorship and collaboration, and you will have the opportunity to contribute to the guidance and supervision of Ph.D., Masters, and Bachelor students. Additionally, there is potential for collaboration with external academic and industrial partners to further enhance the scope and impact of your research.

The project ‘Servus. The reception of Roman law outside of Europe’ funded by the Dutch Institute for Scientific Research (NWO) is a Medium-sized Social Sciences and Humanities-project (SSH M) with a run-time of five years in total. The project concerns the transfer to, application and ‘reception’ of Roman legal texts pertaining to slaves and slavery in three erstwhile colonies: Surinam, Virginia and Chile. The projects contends that developments in these three territories are representative of larger legal-historical tendencies in the Americas as a whole, spanning a time-period between the 15th and the 19th century. Concretely, the research thus entails looking at specific forms of the application of certain complexes of Roman legal texts in these erstwhile colonies ‘on the ground’, meaning in in day-to-day (legal) practice. To be clear, although the texts in question are about the enslaved and slavery, their application in the erstwhile colonies covered other categories such as serfs, servants, indigenous peoples, forced labourers and prisoners of war.