19 PhD Degree-Fully Funded at NTNU, Norway

CLIPEUS aims at creating a communications network among man-made implantable devices and the natural cells inside the body under the novel communication paradigm called Internet of Bio-NanoThings, where sensing, actuation, and computing processes are tightly coupled to pervasively, perpetually, and precisely sense, process, control, and exchange health information of the body in real-time to defend it against infections.  The project focuses on detecting bacterial infections inside the body based on biosensors. The biosensor will be extensively tested and ameliorated in-vitro cell culture experiments as a first step before in vivo experiments. The CLIPEUS project has a PhD student, a Postdoc and a Researcher and is looking to recruit a new PhD student to complete the team.  

The candidate will work in a collaboration between the university, the internationally accredited registrar and classification society DNV, and Cancer Registry of Norway. The candidate will be analyzing and developing algorithms for privacy preserving health registry data access. The goals of such access include supporting registry operations as well as health care research. Of particular interest in this context are differentially private algorithms for federated statistical model parameter estimation. 

The position is funded by the Norwegian Research Center for AI Innovation and will be based in the Cryptology division of the Department of Information Security and Communication Technology.

Your immediate leader is the head of the cryptology division in the Department of Information Security and Communication Technology.

We are seeking a highly motivated and talented candidate for a 3-year PhD position in molecular dynamics simulation with a focus on mineral processing. This position offers an exciting opportunity to contribute to cutting-edge research aimed at advancing our understanding of mineral behavior and interactions at the molecular level. Sustainable mineral processing is critical for the efficient and environmentally friendly extraction of critical raw materials, essential for the green shift and the development of renewable energy technologies. The successful candidate will work within a multidisciplinary team, utilizing advanced simulation techniques to explore the fundamental processes governing mineral processing. 

The successsful candidate will be supervised by Professor Pshem Kowalczuk and will be part of the Mineral Processing Laboratory at NTNU (Mineral processing Laboratory – IGP – NTNU). Research and education at the Mineral Processing Laboratory at NTNU provide vital knowledge on sustainable processing of ores and minerals and the recovery of valuable components from industrial waste. The laboratory is unique in Norway and plays a strategically important role in the shift towards a greener and more circular economy.

The rise of AI and automation as competitors to human labor poses a threat to the employability of workers, particularly those whose tasks are highly susceptible to automation. Recent studies indicate that generative AI could impact 19% of the workforce, with over 50% of their tasks being automated, potentially leading to job losses in specific sectors. Despite this anticipated outcome, the World Economic Forum reports that only 16% of manufacturers implementing AI in their production processes have achieved their AI-related targets. Nonetheless, technology and AI can also enhance and support workers in various tasks, as manual labor remains integral to many work systems.

The Production Management research group at NTNU’s Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering is internationally recognized for its research in human-centered manufacturing and logistics. This PhD position aims to expand the group’s focus on understanding human-technology complementarity. The core of digital manufacturing innovation lies in human-centered and human-driven manufacturing processes, encompassing technical aspects of human-machine interaction, upskilling, reskilling, work and business organization, as well as regulations and standards. This research is part of the EU SkillAIbility project, conducted in collaboration with research and policy partners.

Your research will contribute to the development of human-centric AI methodologies, focusing on the necessary skills and training. You will define criteria based on sociotechnical systems, incorporating human factors and technology applications, to develop methodologies for human-centric design. Additionally, you will assist in creating learning materials and teaching activities aimed at equipping workers with the skills needed for future factories. The Logistics 4.0 Lab at NTNU will provide various technologies, such as collaborative robots and AGVs, for research and demonstration purposes in learning activities.

The Department of Geography at NTNU has a 3-year vacancy for a PhD position in economic geography, contributing to the project Making the Green Shift Work for Regions (GSW). Funded by the Research Council of Norway’s Welfare, Culture and Society programme, the GSW project seeks to better integrate localities and regions, labour markets and working lives as central elements within the green shift, rather than merely as outcomes of the energy transition.  The overall objective is to help develop a new understanding of how regional labour markets are adapting to the challenge of green shift, using the example of Oil & Gas specialised regions. 

Drawing on a geographical labour markets perspective, the GSW project aims to better understand how labour markets processes vary between places, operating and performing differently based on their industrial histories, social and institutional contexts, and regulatory settings.  In particular, the research will explore and develop the regional skills ecosystem as an analytical framework to help develop both theory and policy prescription. As the green shift unfolds, the ways in which different regional skills ecosystems adapt and change will vary and have important implications for processes of regional competitiveness and labour market inclusion. 

In collaboration with the project’s research partners Newcastle University, Sintef Digital and FAFO, the NTNU-led PhD will provide research insights into the evolution and adaptation of the regional skills ecosystems within and across the O&G and green energy sectors.  Particularly important will be identifying the evolving institutional contexts, structure and configuration of regional Oil and Gas labour markets and the extent to which key actors’ develop adaptive strategies and responses to the shifting market and emerging growth of green energy activities.  Within which, the PhD will contribute to the project’s novel international comparative analysis of energy transition in carbon intensive regions across Norway (Rogaland, Trøndelag) and Scotland (Aberdeen and North East Scotland). Applicants are encouraged to conduct research stays abroad and acquire mobility funds from Research Council Norway.

Norwegian ferry quays are frequently exposed to extreme weather (environmental) and harsh operational loads, leading to sudden appearance of structural damage. Magerholm Research Quay (MRQ) was established in 2023 as a collaboration project between Møre og Romsdal County and NTNU, instrumented with vibration sensors for the purpose of developing a structural health monitoring system (SHM) to support decisions on asset maintenance. The objective is to enhance the resilience of ferry quays under the circumstances of unexpected hazards by means of implementing a monitored-enhanced resilience assessment system that is capable of providing sufficient information to support decisions from a very limited number of sensors. Your focus will be to investigate which hazards has the largest potential for affecting the functionality of ferry quays. More specific tasks are listed below.

The PhD position will be within our new research project SARTORIUS, which is funded by the Research Council of Norway. The aim of the project is to assess the ability for ferry quays to withstand and respond to hazard events, involving timely damage detection and accounting for the time needed to reinstate the structure to normal functionality. The project shall provide recommendations for how to best monitor these structures for maximized value of information. You will be working closely with a team of 3 other PhD candidates, professors and researchers from NTNU, The Norwegian Institute of Transport Economics and KU Leuven in Belgium. You will collaborate with Expert asset managers from Norwegian Public Roads Administration and Møre og Romsdal County. 

As a member of the project, you will participate in reporting and publishing the work at conferences and in scientific journals. Your working place will be NTNU Ålesund. At our department, (the department of ocean operations and civil engineering) you will be part of a large international research group, counting more than 40 PhD candidates. 

We are looking for a PhD candidate with a passion for sustainability and eagerness to develop deeper understanding of how practice can continue to implement sustainability in complex building construction projects. Our focus is on how hospitals in Norway can move in a more sustainable direction when financial resources are restricted and implement changes that ensure that built health care environments contribute to a sustainable, circular and regenerative world. Relevant themes for this PhD candidate include decision-making, users’ needs, innovation, organisational learning and the like. 

The candidate will have the opportunity to continue developing a framework for sustainability knowledge  to ensure it fits organizations who wants to develop and implement common understanding and actions within the built environment. The research shall have particular focus on health care facilities, such as hospitals. The focus for this PhD candidate is not directly related to the facilities and how to construct them. The focus is on understanding the perspectives of different roles and actors that links to this issue at hand. Based on this understanding it is expected that the PhD candidate develops frameworks and knowledge that others (later research projects and practitioners) can use to improve their strategies and processes and as such advance their journey towards a sustainable, circular and regenerative built environment. 

Researchers and construction industry actors have desire to create sustainable business models and value chains. Many innovative solutions and state-of-art ideas exist that tend to be expensive. The high cost makes the funding organizations reject such ideas and solutions, thereby hampering the transformation into a sustainable future. So, what can we do? What projects and actions are possible to implement? In this PhD project, we aim to develop deeper understanding for the possibilities enabling project owners to contribute to a sustainable built hospital environment when they are constrained by limited funding.

The Department of Teacher Education, Section for English and Foreign Languages, offers a full-time, 3-year position as a Ph.D. candidate to take part in the project “Climate Change, Language Education, and AI” in cooperation with the research group on technology and learning in education: NTED-DIGIT. The project leaders are Associate Professor Tom Nurmi, Associate Professor Fredrik Mørk Røkenes,  and Postdoctoral Researcher Han Han.

Although AI has the potential to be a tool in climate modeling and remediation efforts, its extractive resource and supply chain costs, e-waste pathways, and carbon footprint actively contribute to pollution and global warming. This project examines how language education can be a site of critical information literacy around environmental climate research and the cost/benefits of AI technologies. The “Climate Change, Language Education, and AI” project explores how AI ed-tech (e.g., text-to-image generators DALL-E/MidJourney) influences students’ epistemic beliefs about environmental climate research and (mis)information in English in the school while also investigating the pedagogical potential of current trends in AI-climate-related natural sciences and humanities projects (e.g., biodiversity monitoring, pollution detection, AI in eco-literature, etc.).  

Migrants’ uneven access to social welfare is one of the most pressing concerns in today’s European Union. InternalFortress will uncover the role that this issue played in the early history of regional integration in the European Economic Community (EEC), focusing on social security, union participation, and skill development.

European rules on ‘freedom of movement’ allowed migrant workers from an EEC member state to claim social protection anywhere in the bloc. The PhD case studies will hone-in on one specific national context – either France or West Germany – to trace how these general rules that were set in Brussels were carried out or contested in practice. What steps were taken in national and local institutions to help European migrants gain access to social services on the ground or to block them from doing so?  Who participated in that process, for example, state administrators, employers, unions, NGOs, churches, or migrant-led mutual aid organizations? Did these actors differentiate between different groups of European and non-European migrants?  

The PhD fellows are encouraged to develop their own approach to these questions, for example by focusing on a particular group of migrants, a locality, an economic sector, or an organization. These in-depth national case studies will complement work by the PI on European and international migration policy and work by the project’s postdoc on Europe’s place in global NGO networks. The team members will work together to build a rich source base that will combine official documents with material from private associations such as Caritas or International Social Service. 

At NTNU’s Department of Modern History and Society, the project team will be housed within a rewarding professional environment with an active community of PhD candidates and postdocs. 

The Department of Geography at NTNU has a vacancy for a 3-year Ph.D. position in Geography with a focus on ‘Extreme weather-related Compound Hazards: Impacts, Risks, and Sustainable Adaptation in a changing climate (ECH-IRSA)’.

We are looking for a motivated candidate with a keen interest in investigating and understanding the dynamic processes behind weather-related compound hazards that characterize the current changing climate. Understanding these compound weather events is crucial for assessing risks, preparing for impacts, and building better forecast models in the face of climate change and extreme weather conditions, as well as essential for identifying better adaptation strategies that enhance a more sustainable community resilience. 

The Ph.D. candidate will be part of the Spatial and Temporal Analytics research group. The group bases its core activities on the development of new or the adaptation of existing tools and techniques for spatio-temporal analytics, such as representation, exploratory visualization and theories and mathematical model development of spatio-temporal data. Support will be given also from members of the Earth Surface Science research group that works mainly in the physical geography domain, focusing on investigating causes, mechanisms and impacts of different environmental hazards.

Becoming a member of our research groups will make you part of an exciting and stimulating international and multidisciplinary academic environment, open and inclusive, with dedicated colleagues willing to support with theoretical and practical experience, for you to excel in your academic career.

We have a vacancy for a four-year Ph.D. position at the Department of Psychology in the area of Work and Organizational Psychology. The Ph.D. student will take part in a research project focused on occupational anxiety and employee health promotion. Specifically, the successful candidate will contribute to developing a measure of occupational anxiety, investigating the predictors and outcomes of occupational anxiety longitudinally, and carrying out an intervention for occupational anxiety. Other aspects of job-related distress may be examined as well. 

We anticipate the starting date for the candidate to be early 2025. The candidate’s broader goal is to complete a doctoral education up to the validation of a doctoral degree. The specific objectives and research questions linked to the Ph.D. project will be developed in consultation with the supervisors during the first months of the doctoral training.

We are looking for applicants with a drive to explore, articulate and document the capacity of art and culture and creativity not only to adapt and contribute but to drive societal transformation processes. 

We think of artistic entrepreneurship as a dynamic agency that promotes innovative collaboration between artists, designers, researchers, public and private actors, and that transcends traditional boundaries to create new possibilities for action. Artistic entrepreneurship involves a collective effort to act together across sectors, disciplines, and society’s actors. Artistic entrepreneurship encourages shared response, shared production methods and creative solutions, and inspires individuals to address society’s most pressing challenges.

The PhD position will offer the successful candidate a unique opportunity to get involved in artistic research at the same time as they investigate the possibilities for entrepreneurship and innovation across disciplines with an artistic starting point. By building a bridge between the expertise at research environments in the NTNU department of design and the Trondheim academy of Fine art, the position will provide a comprehensive framework for examining the role of the creatives as entrepreneurs and change-makers in today’s society. The doctorate will support, unfold, and document the development of the joint master’s program in artistic entrepreneurship and give input to the Horizon Europe-funded research project PACESETTERS, https://pacesetters.eu. 

The position is expected to make use of the TV-studio research infrastructure available in the department and interact with and connect to the PACESETTERS research project and the artistic entrepreneurship master program. The position thus requires a high level of commitment to contribute to an artistic research environment that experiments at the intersections of multiple forms within the framework of knowledge production through the arts.

The Neural Dynamics and Computation group, led by Soledad Gonzalo Cogno, is a computational neuroscience group recently established at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience.

The institute is part of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at NTNU. It was established as a Centre of Excellence in 2002, 2012, and again in 2023. Our new Centre of Excellence, the Center for Algorithms in the Cortex will be funded for 10 years by the Norwegian Research Council. The scientific goal of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience is to understand neural circuits and systems in the cortex and to identify neural-population mechanisms underlying high-level cognitive functions. 

For a position as a PhD Candidate, the goal is a completed doctoral education up to an obtained doctoral degree.

The position is anchored at NTNU in Ålesund and is part of the multi-partner SFI Harvest project – Technologies for sustainable biomarine value creation. We are looking for candidates with a background or experience within at least one of the following areas: Business strategy, sustainability / environmental management, sustainable supply/value chain management, management rules for the fisheries, marketing mechanisms for fish food products. You will report to the Head of Department.

Sustainability within the value chains in biomarine sector becomes and increasingly overall requirement for production of sustainable fish products.

The main purpose of the PhD is to build a prospective and comprehensive business model for sustainability for the development of sustainable feed production.

(18) PhD Degree – Fully Funded

PhD position summary/title: PhD Candidate in Real Implementation of Model Predictive Control for Building Heating

Deadline :  22.08.24

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(19) PhD Degree – Fully Funded

Work package 1 of the Asia-Africa Blue Tech Superhighway (COAST) project aims to develop digital information systems for effective management of small-scale fisheries in Kenya, Zanzibar and Tanzania. These fisheries are multi-species, geographically dispersed and exhibit flexible and dynamic fishing patterns. This makes data collection, stock assessment and data-informed management difficult. To address this, a high resolution near real-time digital catch monitoring system will be designed and implemented, including trackers to be installed on a selection of fishing vessels. 

This PhD position will focus on improving the existing monitoring system, and develop dynamic maps of ocean conditions plus predictions of good fishing zones, based on catch and effort data plus partially simulated and partially measured oceanographic data. This system will furthermore be used to provide input to fisheries management though the use of AI methods and control theory.

The position reports to Associate Professor Morten Omholt Alver, [email protected] , who will be the main supervisor. Prof. Damiano Varagnolo will be co-supervisor.