Postdoctoral Fellowship (06) at University of Twente, Netherlands

The Nonlinear Nanophotonics (NLNP) group is looking for several excellent post-docs to assist in the development of next-generation integrated photonic chips for optical clocks, integrated light sources for quantum technology and advanced integrated microwave photonic chips for 6G telecommunications and beyond. These applications will rely on stimulated Brillouin scattering in various waveguide platforms, including but not limited to thin-film lithium niobate. Fabrication of these chips will be done by you in the renowned MESA+ Nanolab or in collaboration with our partners. Your work will include selecting the most appropriate material platform, design the optical functionalities of the photonic integrated circuit, create the mask design and manufacture the photonic chip in the clean room. Subsequently, you will characterize the photonic chip using our advanced and well-equipped laboratory. You will work in an enticing environment comprising over 70 scientists working in photonics.

This fully funded 3-year Postdoctoral Researcher position is part of the project TRUPASS, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). The vision of TruPASS is that Digital Product Passports (DPPs) not only serve as a trusted technological artifact but, through their use and technological functioning, enable trust as a shared organizing principle amongst the ecosystem stakeholders.

We are seeking a highly motivated Postdoctoral Researcher to join our interdisciplinary research team and examine how trust interacts with (structural) governance principles, ecosystem properties, and stakeholder expectations/behaviour, amongst others. You will map ecosystems relationships through trust mapping and stakeholder analysis, using methods such as literature review, qualitative interviews, and network analysis to identify key actors, trust flows, and governance dynamics.

We invite applications for a 3-year postdoctoral position (preferably a physicist or physics-minded chemist) on stimuli-responsive adaptive polymer brush systems. This is a collaborative project between the University of Twente and partners at the Leibniz Institute for Polymer Research (IPF) in Dresden, Germany.

Polymer brushes—densely tethered polymer chains extending from surfaces—exhibit strong responsiveness to environmental stimuli such as solvent composition, temperature, light, or electric fields. In this project, we aim to exploit this responsiveness to design multi-layer polymer brush architectures with dynamically tunable wetting, solute transport, and trapping properties. The work connects fundamental polymer and soft-matter physics with concepts from intelligent materials and bio-inspired autonomous systems.

The research involves experimental studies of swelling, wetting, and transport phenomena, and the development of physical interpretations of responsive behavior in confined polymer systems. (Synthesis of complex polymer architectures will primarily be carried out by the partners in Dresden.)

We are seeking a Postdoctoral Researcher with a strong quantitative background to work across two strategically connected research projects, addressing some of the most pressing challenges in contemporary Health Technology Assessment (HTA): labour scarcity in healthcare and sustainable healthcare decision-making.

Project 1: Sustainable Cardiac Care – A Forward-Looking HTA Framework

This project develops an integrated, future-oriented HTA framework to evaluate the sustainability of two clinically equivalent procedures for low-complexity multi-vessel coronary artery disease: coronary artery bypass grafting and percutaneous coronary intervention.

The project combines Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), Discrete-Event Simulation (DES), and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to evaluate clinical, economic, environmental, organizational, and patient-centred outcomes across full patient journeys. Results will inform national decision-making and provide a transferable framework for broader healthcare applications.

Project 2: Better cost estimates for scarce human resources in HTA using the production possibilities frontier

The shortage of qualified personnel already is an issue in Dutch healthcare, and this will only increase in the future. Hence, healthcare innovations need to be evaluated for their impact on use of scarce human resources. In principle, existing methods for cost-effectiveness analysis can do this, but the incorporated costs do not reflect labour scarcity due to labour market failures. In this project, we investigate methods for better estimation of labour costs, reflecting scarcity, by further developing methods from data envelopment analysis. We aim to develop a new method that can be applied in economic evaluations to enhance more efficient use of scarce resources, leading to lower waiting times and/or better care. We will apply the new methodology to two case studies, in mental health and pharmacy care.

We offer a challenging PostDoc position with the Human Media Interaction and the Psychology of Conflict, Risk, and Safety groups of the University of Twente, working on novel, mixed paradigm VR training technology for first responders who encounter people with concerning behaviour (“Onbegrepen gedrag”). The training designs will be developed (and tested) together with people from both sides, aiming to balance the real needs of both first responders and people with concerning behaviour.

The ZonMw funded project “REaL-VR (Reflective Experiential Learning in Virtual Reality)” aims to deliver novel training technology for first responders (police, community officers) who encounter people with concerning behavior. Such encounters can be stressful for first responders who often find it difficult to determine the best way to interact with the person in need. Our novel training is intended to help them feel more confident and better prepared and therefore respond more appropriately to specific needs of the people with concerning behavior. In this way, we can help ensure more positive encounters between vulnerable people and responders.

We are looking for an enthusiastic and highly motivated postdoc candidate to join as soon as possible the Mathematics of Computational Science (MACS) group within the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Twente. You will work under the supervision of Dr. Gregor Gantner on a project dedicated to advancing the field of adaptive methods for time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs). The position is funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) via the Vidi research project Optimal adaptive spacetime boundary and finite element methods.

The project focuses on the design, numerical analysis, and implementation of novel numerical algorithms to efficiently solve parabolic PDEs such as the heat equation. More precisely, you shall investigate space-time finite element methods (FEM) and space-time boundary element methods (BEM), which both discretize the PDE as a whole, treating time as yet another dimension. In particular, this allows for fully flexible local mesh refinement in the space-time cylinder. You will develop suitable a-posteriori computable estimators for the discretization error to adaptively steer the mesh refinement and mathematically prove that the resulting algorithms converge optimally with respect to the number of mesh elements. You will further implement and thereby validate the theoretical results through numerical experiments.