15 Postdoctoral Fellowship at University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

You will be conducting innovative research on Sustainable Global Economic Law (SGEL)—a unique interdisciplinary research project bringing together legal scholars across legal sub-disciplines to  work on the interactions between global economic law, environmental and social justice issues. Besides your individual research projects, you will also actively contribute to the organization of international events and joint research projects, working within an interdisciplinary team. The research on SGEL forms part of a larger national collaboration under the topic “Transformative Effects of Globalization within Law” (TEGL), a collaboration between four Dutch law faculties: Tilburg University, Maastricht University, Open University and University of Amsterdam that examines how law can foster just sustainability in global contexts. Finally, as part of your role, you will have the opportunity to contribute to teaching innovative courses in either international public or EU law.

You will be conducting innovative research and be actively contributing to a project entitled Integrity and Objectivity in Legal Research: What Should Legal Analysis Become? The project is embedded within the Amsterdam Center for International Law (ACIL) and connects to the University Research Priority Area (RPA) ‘Decolonial Futures’—a collaboration between the faculties of Law, Humanities (lead), and Social and Behavioural Sciences (to start in 2023). Briefly: On the one hand, ‘new humanities’ and critical legal theory have emphasized the partiality and situatedness of all knowledge production. On the other hand, past and present predicaments and future-oriented approaches might push for a new approach to universality. Rightly so? Relatedly, the Law Faculty’s report on Scientific Integrity demands a renewed take on crucial questions about inescapably situated knowledge that still aspires towards universality. The research project’s overarching questions include: What should legal analysis become amidst nested crises? Do universals require an impossible ‘view from nowhere’? What are the possibilities of a ‘view from everywhere’? What can ethics in law become in the absence of universal claims? What is the impact of genealogy critique that draws out the partiality and situatedness of all knowledge on claims to integrity and objectivity? Besides your individual research projects, you will also actively contribute to the organization of events at ACIL, the Law Faculty and in the Decolonial Futures RPA, working within interdisciplinary and diverse teams. Finally, as part of your role, you will contribute to teaching innovative courses in public international law and thesis supervision (up to 30% of your position).

Are you a eager to push optical atomic clocks and atom interferometers to new levels in a lively, international research group? Our Strontium Quantum Gases Group is looking for a postdoc who wants to take part in leading the new Quantum Delta NL (QDNL) Ultracold Quantum Sensing Testbed. This group is headed by Prof. Florian Schreck and is part of the Quantum Gases & Quantum Information (QG&QI) cluster at the Institute of Physics (IoP) of the University of Amsterdam (UvA). We exploit ultracold Sr gases for quantum sensing, the study of many-body physics and for quantum computing. We are collaborating with industry, startups and users to bring optical clocks to the market and explore new ways to build sensors, such as superradiant clocks or atom interferometers based on continuous atom lasers.

This postdoctoral position focuses on research aimed at advancing computational methods for communication science (e.g., automated content analysis). Technological advancements enable communication scientists to collect different types of data (e.g., through scraping social media data, gathering data through digital agents, receiving data through data donations). Introduction of these novel data collection methods results in availability of large quantities of data that come in various formats (e.g., text data, visual data). This brings on methodological challenges of analyzing such data. In sum, communication researchers now have a broad range of novel computational methods at their disposal to gather and analyze large amounts of data that vary in their format. However, there is a lack of knowledge about the usage and validity of these methods. For example, whereas some algorithms are available to analyze visual data, these algorithms have not been validated on data relevant to communication scholars. This postdoctoral position will contribute to advancing the Lab’s methodological and substantive research in this area by conducting research that advances and validates methods aimed at gathering and analyzing data that are relevant to communication scholars.

Do you enjoy

• Engaging in cutting-edge research on disinformation, as part of the European Digital Media Observatory EDMO;
• Participating in groups of internationally renowned scholars, and join peer networks, with many opportunities to engage and develop your career; 
• Being part of a state-of-the-art research, innovative in focus and approach;
• Being part of supporting the activities of EDMO and working with the Executive Board.

As part of an European Reseach Council grant (TRUSTPATH), the Experimental & Political Economics group (CREED), at the Amsterdam School of Economics (UvA) has a two-year postdoc vacancy in the field of behavioural ethics. We seek outstanding motivated applicants with a strong interest in experimental economics and psychology for a project investigating wilful ignorance.

The Department of Anthropology at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences is seeking a postdoctoral researcher for the CHINAWHITE project, which is funded by the European Research Council and led by Dr Shanshan Lan. As a postdoctoral researcher, you will be part of the the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) programme group Moving Matters.

Are you a theorist looking for an opportunity to develop new theoretical and computational tools for quantum logic spectroscopy and work closely with experiments? The theory group of Arghavan Safavi-Naini is part of the institute of theoretical physics (ITFA) at the University of Amsterdam and QuSoft. We work closely with theory groups at QuSoft and experiments within the Quantum Gases and Quantum Information (QGQI) cluster to develop new technologies for quantum simulation and computing. We develop computational tools and theoretical methods to study out-of-equilibrium quantum many-body systems with applications to quantum enhanced metrology and quantum information theory.

Do you enjoy;
 

• Engaging in cutting-edge methodological research as part of interdisciplinary team on pressing media effects questions? 
• Participating in groups of internationally renowned scholars, and join peer networks, with many opportunities to engage and develop your career?
• Being part of a state-of-the-art research, innovative in focus and approach?
• Benefitting from a well-funded, future-oriented training and development programme, including personal-professional development? 

Are you fascinated by the latest DNA and RNA technologies that are the basis of current and future major scientific breakthroughs in the Life Sciences? Do you enjoy setting up, improving, and applying these genomics technologies in joint research projects with life scientists? Then the position as Researcher Genomics & Technologies at the Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences (SILS) of the University of Amsterdam might suit you and we would be happy to discuss this with you.

The department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies is currently developing a centre of expertise in Jewish Urban Studies. We want to create an environment where the dynamics of Jewish urban cultures are studied diachronically and synchronically, with an emphasis on Western Europe in the early modern and modern period. As a postdoc, you will be part of this new initiative and play an important role in its development. Your own project will be at the heart of a larger collaborative research project, currently under construction, on the Jewish and non-Jewish perception and conservation of (former) Jewish sites and quarters in Western European cities after 1945. Using Amsterdam as a case study, your project will help build its methodological basis, by mapping the changing definitions, demarcations and meanings attributed to Jewish places and spaces in the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

We have developed a device to simultaneously characterize molecular structure and size by combining microfluidic technology with infrared spectroscopy (both conventional and nonlinear). This device produces two- and three-dimensional spectra, in which the different species present in a solution are separated based on their infrared frequencies and their size: InfraRed Diffusion-Ordered SpectroscopY (IRDOSY). We have already carried out proof-of-concept experiments and built a functional model of the device, see https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.202213424 and https://youtu.be/CAbtopRA04g

Project 1 is part of the ongoing project “Modeling news flows: How feedback loops influence citizens beliefs and shape democracy” (NEWSFLOWS). Projects 2 and 3 are part of the upcoming consortium project “Twin of Online Networks” (TWON).

Project 1 is called “NEWSFLOWS-WP4 Feedback loops in different contexts”. It is supervised by Anne Kroon and Damian Trilling. We investigate human and algorithmic feedback loops, such as – for example – news recommender systems that tailor content based on user behaviour, and in doing so, shape user attitudes and behaviour. You will be investigating how (1) platform characteristics, (2) time, and (3) media systems shape such feedback loops. First, different platforms have different characteristics and affordances: connections can be reciprocal or not, mechanisms such as ‘likes’, ‘shares’, ‘retweets’, ‘claps’, ‘toots’, all have different implications for the dissemination of content. Second, date and time granularity play a role: the dissemination of a piece of information is clearly influenced by the timing of the initial post and the timing of the first shares it receives. Third, the media system matters. For instance, a major criticism of selective exposure theory is that its propositions mainly hold in already polarized contexts and people’s attitudes (and hence, presumably their behaviour) regarding news dissemination via social media or algorithmic recommender systems differ widely between countries. Building on tools and approaches developed by other work packages in the NEWSFLOWS project, we will conduct an online field experiment and an automated news dissemination analysis in multiple countries. In particular, we will compare a liberal (Ireland), a democratic-corporatist (Netherlands), a polarized pluralist (France) and a post-communist (Czech Republic) media system. This will allow us to make robust theoretical claims about the effect of feedback loops on diversity and polarization.

Projects 2 and 3 are part of the new consortium project “Twin of Online Networks” (TWON), with partners from the Netherlands, Germany, Slovakia, and Serbia. They are supervised by Corinna Oschatz and Damian Trilling. The goal of the project is to develop a novel empirical method for systematically researching the effects of design choices of mechanisms inside online social networks, by creating digital twins of social network sites, called TWONs. Such a TWON can then be used to study counterfactuals, such as: How would the effects look like, had the online social network been designed differently? We will combine empirical observations of existing OSNs, theory-informed simulations, and specific case studies.

Project 2 is called “TWON-WP5-1 Measuring debate quality”. In order to evaluate the effects of different platform mechanics, one important pillar is the development of theoretically solid, but also scalable metrics of debate quality. In close collaboration with the other partners, you define a set of scalable metrics, which – based on textual and structural features of social media interactions – help to quantitatively measure how constructive democratic debates are. Specific attention will be paid to issues of ethics, diversity, and inclusion, such as avoiding biases towards minorities. You will do so in two iterations, first creating a prototype that we will then use in the field – and after that, you will further refine the metric. We expect thorough theoretical knowledge about relevant concepts such as theories of democracy and public sphere, the methodological expertise to make solid suggestions on their operationalization in the context of social network sites, and ideally also the skills to implement (a prototype of) these metrics.

Project 3 is called “TWON-WP5-2 Case studies”. Together with our academic and societal partners, you will conduct studies on discussions around the conflict in Ukraine and COVID-19. We will start with a pilot, before rolling out a larger study based on the insights we learned. The studies will take place in the context of Germany and the Balkans. To do so, we aim to use innovative methods: In particular, we plan to recruit participants and ask them to donate data on their use of online media to get an estimate of their real-life exposure to content related to these discussions (for more  information on data donation, click here). Subsequently, we plan to ask them to use our TWON. Combining log data with survey data, we then get a detailed picture of how people’s usage of the TWON depends on the affordances and parameters of the TWON. We expect thorough theoretical knowledge on the usage of social media in a political context, as well as the methodological expertise on to conduct advanced statistical analyses on large  and complex datasets.