Postdoctoral Fellowship (04) at Utrecht University, Netherlands

The successful candidate will contribute to research on eating disorders and teach in our Bachelor and/or Master Psychology program. In this role you will be working with dr. Lot Sternheim and be part of the Clinical Psychology: cognitive and emotional processes research group (Chair: Prof. Elske Salemink). You will also have the opportunity to work together with eating disorder researchers from both the Utrecht University and clinical eating disorder institutions.

Fifty percent of the research time will be allocated to research projects on eating disorders in Southern African countries and their correlates (i.e. body image, trauma, globalization and food insecurity). The other fifty percent of research time can be used by the Postdoctoral Researcher to set up or establish their own research line in agreement with dr. Lot Sternheim. Preferably this is eating disorder related, but other areas of research can be considered. The core tasks of the Postdoctoral Researcher include (jointly) designing and conducting studies, analysing data, preparing manuscripts, and presenting findings at international conferences. Twenty percent of the position involves teaching responsibilities, to be agreed upon jointly with the department and the postdoc; these may include supervising BA and MA thesis students, supervising MA internship students, and teaching working groups.

This is a three-year position supported by two externally funded research projects: the ERC-funded project ProblemShifting and the EU Horizon project MAR-CO2. Together, these projects create a common research agenda around how emerging climate and sustainability interventions can be understood, assessed, and governed in ways that account for their risks, trade-offs, and wider consequences. The research will have a strong focus on marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) as a timely and policy-relevant case, while also allowing scope to examine related technological interventions with planetary-scale implications.

In this role, you will work at the intersection of global sustainability governance, ocean governance, international law, international relations, science and technology studies, and mCDR policy. You will be part of an interdisciplinary research environment and will work closely with the project teams directed by Rak Kim and Miranda Boettcher. 

Your main responsibility will be to take a leading role in collaborative research that contributes to the objectives and deliverables of both projects. This will include producing high-quality academic outputs, as well as contributing to project reports, transdisciplinary workshops, participatory foresight scenario development processes, stakeholder engagement, and dissemination activities.

At Utrecht University’s strategic theme Dynamics of Youth, we study youth and youth development from conception to early adulthood. We connect science and society to contribute to a better future for young people, and through them, for all of us. Dynamics of Youth is looking for an enthusiastic and ambitious postdoctoral researcher to join our core team for 1.5 years (0.8-1.0 FTE).

In this postdoc position, you combine interdisciplinary research with partnership brokering and infrastructure building. You will contribute both to high-quality academic research and to strengthening the connections between science, policy, and practice.

In interdisciplinary research projects, you will examine how global uncertainty is experienced by young people and how it is shaped across the different contexts in which they grow up, such as families, peer networks, schools, communities, and broader institutional conditions. Together with societal partners, you will investigate which protective and promotive resources help young people stay connected, maintain hope, and develop agency in uncertain times. You will work with existing datasets to study these questions from a socio-ecological and multisystemic perspective. This requires confidence in working with large, complex, and multilevel data. We are looking for someone who is methodologically strong and not intimidated by the messiness of real-world data.

At the Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences (IRAS) at Utrecht University, we are looking for a postdoctoral researcher who wants to help answer that question. Together with Dr Martijn Kolijn and Prof. Roel Vermeulen, you will investigate how environmental and lifestyle exposures the exposome shape cancer risk, often years before a tumour is ever found. By connecting molecular signals measured in blood long before diagnosis to the biology of the tumours that eventually appear, you will help build the evidence base for a more preventive, biology-driven approach to cancer one that could, over time, change how many lives this disease shapes.

This work sits at the intersection of molecular biology, epidemiology, and environmental health and is embedded in large international collaborations across Europe and the USA.

In this project, “Bridging the Molecular Biology and Epidemiology of Cancer Development”, you will:

• Contribute to large ongoing projects exploring cancer development, including ESCALATION, SPACETIME, DISCERN, and COVIDMETA;
• Analyse high-resolution mass spectrometry data (exogenous and endogenous metabolomics) and high-throughput targeted proteomics (Olink/SomaScan) from prospective population cohorts to characterise the internal exposome;
• Link molecular alterations observed in plasma years before cancer diagnosis to molecular signatures observed in tumour biopsies at diagnosis;
• Apply advanced statistical and machine learning methods to identify and validate environmental determinants of cancer risk;
• Link high-resolution exposome surfaces (from projects such as EXPANSE and EXPOSOME-NL) to large population cohorts;
• Integrate external (environmental) and internal (biological) exposome data to build a more complete picture of environmental contributions to cancer;
• Collaborate closely with colleagues within IRAS (Dr Martijn Kolijn and Prof. Roel Vermeulen) and at partner institutes across Europe and the USA;
• Share your findings through scientific publications and international conferences—and help translate them into insights that support cancer prevention.