Postdoctoral Fellowship (15) at University of Oslo, Norway

The postdoctoral research fellow will be part of the research project The Salmon Elite: Its politics, self-understanding, networks, and wealth (SALELITE), which is financed by the Research Council of Norway and headed by Katharina Sass (UiB) and Maren Toft (UiO). The fellow is expected to pursue independent research in collaboration with the project participants within the scope of the SALELITE-project.

The project aims to examine the politics, self-understanding, networks, and wealth of the Norwegian salmon elite; meaning the owners and top executives of the companies in the field of fish farming in Norway. The project builds on theoretical contributions from political economy, focusing on the role of business in policymaking, and on contributions from elite sociology, focusing on the wealth, networks, and political self-justifications of elites.  The project is organized into three work packages. WP1 analyses the tax politics of the salmon elite based on publicly available qualitative data (such as documents published by salmon companies, media coverage, and party manifestos). WP2 focuses on the salmon elite’s self-understanding and self-justifications, based on qualitative interviews with entrepreneurs, heirs, and top executives of the salmon industry. WP3 examines the economic power, kinship structures, and social networks within the salmon elite, based on data from the Brønnøysund Register Centre and on party financing.  The successful candidate is expected to develop a research agenda and contribute to the project’s WP3. 

We seek candidates with the potential to contribute to the development of sociology as a discipline at the department. The fellow is expected to pursue independent research, as outlined in their submitted project proposals. We value the contribution of young scholars to the academic environment and study programmes in the department and encourage candidates with a desire to participate actively in departmental life to apply. 

The Department of Political Science is recruiting up to two Postdoctoral Fellows (SKO 1352) with specialization in political data science or comparative politics. We are looking for an excellent candidate with the potential of pursuing a long-term career in academia. The successful applicant will be part of the research project, “Authoritarian Threats to Scientific Knowledge” (AutoKnow), which is funded by the European Research Council. The appointment is a fulltime position for a period of three years. Depending on the candidate’s competence and the teaching needs of the department, the fellowship period can be extended up to four years for other types of qualification work including various teaching tasks and obligations.

The primary aim of AutoKnow is to investigate how the production of scientific knowledge is affected by authoritarian regimes and politics. The project will look at how authoritarian rule affects the contents and research trajectories of scientific fields, and which fields are targeted for repression and co-optation by authoritarian rulers and movements. It will use computational text analysis to measure content-dimensions of published science and collect different data on attacks on academic freedom. It will study how authoritarian rule affects scientific progress, topic choice, political bias, idea novelty and other dimensions.

As a post-doctoral fellow, you will be working on the NORCIE project alongside Professors Craig Parsons and Bent Sofus Tranøy at ARENA, as well as partners in the project at the Department of Economics, UiO, the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI), and the Peace Research Institute Oslo. You will be expected to both assist with research tasks designed by the project leaders and to develop and implement your own research in related areas. The position is announced within the overall thematic focus of the NORCIE project, with a particular emphasis on NORCIE’s research regarding the evolving EU economic order. Given NORCIE’s mission to inform Norwegian policy discussions, it is desirable that candidates have an interest in issues of relevance to Norway.

The selected candidate should have research experience and interests that connect to some of the ARENA-led components of NORCIE. 

The largest part of ARENA’s involvement in NORCIE will be related to studying the evolving EU economic order. The concept of rules-based openness has always been at the core of EU economic principles, but major pressures are pushing the EU to develop more active and discretionary capabilities. We will study these processes of change from both inside the EU (with interview research on the EU’s evolving policies regarding tradable goods, financial services, and information technology) and in the EU’s key external relationships (researching the related policies of the US, China, Russia, India and Brazil and their consequences for interactions with the EU). 

Applicants are invited for two to three positions as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Research on Equality in Education (CREATE), University of Oslo, Norway. The positions are a three to four-year full-time position. 

The positions have a double affiliation with the Centre for Research on Equality in Education (CREATE) and the Department of Special Needs Education. The main workplace will be CREATEs premises at the University of Oslo.

CREATE is an interdisciplinary Centre of Excellence funded by the Research Council of Norway (2023-2033) with the objective to generate novel knowledge about how to reduce inequalities in education. The interdisciplinary centre integrates researchers with substantive expertise from education, special education, psychology, sociology, economics, and genetics, and methodological expertise from educational measurement, psychometrics, econometrics, statistics, and biostatistics. The postdoctoral fellowships are associated with CREATE’s research strand 2: “Intervening on the barriers to equality in education”.  

The Department of Special Needs Education offers a Bachelor’s degree in special needs education and five special education majors (speech and language therapy, hearing, language and communication, specific learning difficulties, psycho-social difficulties, and neurodevelopmental disorders) at the Master’s level, in addition to an international Master’s program (Master in Special Needs Education). The department’s lab, Oslo Special Education and Learning Lab (Oslo SpeLL) offers an excellent possibility to incorporate research, innovation and student activities into a clinical context.

This position is part of The Norwegian Centre for Embodied AI (NCEI, https://www.ntnu.edu/web/ncei), one of Norway’s six national AI centres. NCEI brings together leading robotics and AI groups with key partners from across Norway with international collaborators to study how intelligence emerges from the interaction between body, computation, and environment, in various types of flying, ground-based, and aquatic robots. Our mission is to chart a generalisable path for physical AI and transform how robot morphology and autonomy are co-designed, enabling new generations of systems tailored to their operational environments and missions. You will join an international community with world-class facilities and strong collaborations across Norwegian universities, research institutes, industry, public agencies, and leading global institutions.

This postdoc position will focus on Ethics in Embodied AI. Embodied AI systems introduce unique ethical concerns due to their physical presence and ability to interact with the world. As these systems advance, we have a responsibility to address issues ranging from safety and security to social impacts and environmental sustainability.

A fully funded Postdoctoral Research Fellowship position is offered in the frame-work of the ERC StG project DYNAMICE – Exploring the impact of aniso-tropic viscosity on the interplay between ice and mantle dynamics. The successful candidate will be part of an international team with collaborators both in the University of Oslo, and outside (https://www.mn.uio.no/geo/english/research/projects/dynamice/index.html ). 

About the DYNAMICE project: Ice and olivine, the main building crystals of ice sheets and the mantle, respectively, are two of the most anisotropic crystals on Earth. This means that individual crystals have preferred slip systems, along which it is easier to deform them. Depending on the deformation direction with respect to the mean orientation of crystals in both ice and mantle rock, the bulk viscosity can vary by a few orders of magnitude. Such variations in viscosity can greatly affect the flow of ice from ice divides to the sea, as well as the mantle’s viscous response to the unloading of deglaciated ice. As a result, spatial differences in ice texture can locally enhance or slow down ice flow, leading to some areas with faster than average ice loss and others where ice is stabilized. Moreover, in locations where ice loss is fast, and where mantle textures are favourably oriented, the viscous response of the mantle can be fast enough to uplift the ice and slow further ice loss, potentially stabilizing the ice sheet. Hence, anisotropic viscosity might play a critical role in the interplay between ice and mantle dynamics. In DYNAMICE, we will implement a framework to infer anisotropic viscosity from both ice and mantle textures in a numerical flow model. This will open new avenues for understanding solid earth and cryosphere dynamics, and their critical interactions that affect the future of Earth’s ice sheets. 

The Postdoctoral fellow will be responsible for implementing ice dynamics within regional ice sheet models to be developed using the geodynamic soft-ware ASPECT. Together with other members of the team, the postdoctoral fellow will test the role of ice texture evolution and related anisotropic viscosity in fast and slow flowing parts of the ice sheet. ASPECT has a flexible, modular design, and it is the fastest developing community code in geodynamics. It provides modern numerical methods built on libraries like PETSc and deal.ii, such as adaptive mesh refinement, solving Multiphysics, and has great power in parallelization. ASPECT has not been used previously for ice sheet modelling, but has the potential to provide us a new tool for full coupling of Solid Earth and ice dynamics.

The main purpose of a postdoctoral fellowship is to provide the candidates with enhanced skills to pursue a scientific top position within or beyond academia. To promote a strategic career path, all postdoctoral research fellows are required to submit a professional development plan no later than one month after commencement of the postdoctoral period.

The project’s overarching aim is to study the development of the epigraphic written culture in medieval Scandinavia, investigating the introduction and spread of Latin and the Latin alphabet in Scandinavian inscriptions, and their relationship to the vernacular languages and to runes.

During the high and late Middle Ages, Scandinavian epigraphy was characterized by sustained coexistence and interaction between different languages and writing systems. The simultaneous presence of Latin and the Latin alphabet, and various vernacular languages and the runic script, resulted in a written culture shaped by three overlapping processes: 1) the initial spread of Latin alongside the runic tradition; 2) increased Latinization and decline of the runes; 3) ‘re-vernacularization’, the increasing use of the Scandinavian languages but written in the Latin alphabet. EpiCentres aims to investigate these processes through the study of an extensive corpus of Scandinavian inscriptions and graffiti in the Latin alphabet – largely overlooked as a source for these far-reaching cultural transformations – together with the contemporaneous runic inscriptions.

The EpiCentres team is led by Associate Professor Alessandro Palumbo and will be comprised of one PhD candidate (3 years), two postdoctoral fellows (3 years), and Professor Anna Blennow. The postdoctoral fellow will be a full member of the team aiming at successfully completing the project’s goals. The project consists of three work packages, and the candidate will contribute in particular to work package 1 and work package 2.

Work package 1 aims to geographically and chronologically map the introduction and spread of the Latin alphabet in Scandinavian epigraphy. Through geospatial analyses, the team will investigate which hubs emerge as central for the production and display of epigraphic texts, and how their linguistic and alphabetic composition changed over time.

Work package 2 aims to investigate the intersections and interactions of epigraphic traditions in different languages and writing systems. Within this work package, the postdoc fellow will contribute to examining the evolution of epigraphy in the Latin alphabet in medieval Scandinavia, focusing in particular on the relationship between the development of writing practices in the vernacular languages and in Latin. Their research will focus on how textual composition, orthography, palaeography, and text display develop within traditions in different languages, and the extent to which such practices are shared or diverge across Latin-language and vernacular inscriptions.

We are seeking a researcher who will be responsible for Work Package 3 (WP3): Book Censorship and Poetry in Francoist Spain. This subproject investigates how Franco’s regime censored Spanish literature and poetry; how it implemented its censorship and propaganda plans; how writers, in particular poets, collaborated and resisted the regime; and what is the legacy of literary censorship today. It is divided into four thematic research streams: 1) Archives, 2) Ideals, 3) Tactics, and 4) Traces.

The position is based at ILOS, University of Oslo, with an archival research stay in Spain. Fieldwork is expected to be primarily conducted at the Archivo General de la Administración (AGA), in Alcalá de Henares, close to Madrid, with additional training at the University of Alcalá. The researcher is expected to be responsible for data collection in Spain, to develop the Spanish side of a catalogue of censored words and metaphors, as well as entries for the project’s glossary of terms and handbook on the tactics of repression and resistance. Core outputs include 4 articles that stem from preparing and analyzing data, together with methodologies and literature surveys relevant to the topic.

The position is associated with the European Union funded COMBAT project. The details about the project can be found here: https://combatdengue.hemsida.eu/ 

The researcher will be associated with the work package 2 – DEVELOP high-throughput and super-resolution tools for virus research. The role of the researcher is to design and build advanced optical diffraction tomography (ODT). The ODT will be used for imaging organoids and a correlative fluorescence microscopy must be integrated with the ODT. A close co-operation with COMBAT partners associated with WP 2, i.e. both the academic institutions, Karolinska Institute Sweden, Stichting Amsterdam UMC (UMC), The Netherlands, Justus Liebig University (JLU), Germany; and the industrial partners, React4life Spa (R4L), Italy and Chip NanoImaging AS, Norway is anticipated. 

The researcher is anticipated to have experimental optical instrumentation background and exposure to build next generation ODT that can support high imaging depth e.g. 200-300 um inside the organoid. In addition, the researcher is anticipated to support with fluorescence based super-resolution optical microscopy using photonic-chip illumination. The chip based super-resolution microscopy will be used for imaging thin sections from organoids. The researcher is anticipated to strengthen and support the existing team members involved in this project. 

The researcher will get an opportunity to travel within the COMBAT consortium and to collaborate with both the biologist and the technology drivers and will conduct multi-disciplinary research at the cross-roads of biology and physics.

The position is funded by Coeliac UK as part of a research project that will explore whether low-level gluten exposure (i.e. levels below the current definition of gluten free diet) can cause gut inflammation and gut damage in subjects with coeliac disease. Specifically, we will in a placebo-controlled oral gluten challenge trial seek to determine whether repeat low-dose of gluten can induce immune activation and low-level gut inflammation. The project builds upon recent data from the Centre (PMID 40828615) that identifies a central role for interferon gamma in the induction of gut damage and remodeling. In this project we will perform multiparameter flow-cytometry of gut biopsies collected from patients subjected to low-dose gluten challenge as well as short-term ex vivo biopsy cultures to determine the source of inflammatory cytokines and experimentally establish a mechanistic link between immune cell activation, cytokine secretion and gut inflammation and remodeling in response to dietary gluten. This project will rely on advanced cell biology methods including establishment ex vivo short-term intestinal biopsy culture followed by down-stream processing and analysis by methods such as flow cytometry, microscopy imaging and mass spectrometry-based proteomics. 

The successful applicant will join a world leading research environment on celiac disease with a strong track record in mucosal immunology, cell biology and tissue processing. The candidate will work in a multidisciplinary team with access to relevant training and support. The workplace will be in the research group of prof. Ludvig Sollid at the Institute of Immunology at Oslo University Hospital – Rikshospitalet. 

Two Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SKO 1352) are available at the  Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas (IFIKK), University of Oslo.

The positions are affiliated with the ERC Synergy project WritingLife: The Ethics of AI-Enabled Synthetic DNA (grant number 101224766 – WritingLife), led by Professor Anna Smajdor. The project is conducted in collaboration with Dr. Adrián Villalba (International University of Valencia, Spain) and Dr. Karen Filbee-Dexter (University of Western Australia, Australia and Institute of Marine Research, Norway).

Central to this project is the refinement of a molecular measure for gut damage developed at our research Centre, the biopsy proteome score, which converts gut tissue proteomics data to a single-value numerical score as a disease measure. This score can accurately assess the degree of gut healing on treatment with gluten free diet, or gut damage upon reintroduction of dietary gluten (PMID: 38467384 PMID: 39209203). In the current project, we will tailor this score to specifically monitor inflammatory processes in the gut, and correlate gut proteomics data and biopsy proteome scores to proteomics data from serum. This project will give important data about the safety of low-level gluten exposure in coeliac
disease.

The researcher position focuses on mass spectrometry-based proteomics analysis of clinical samples and bioinformatics analysis of such data. The successful applicant will join a multidisciplinary research environment with focus on translational and clinical research on coeliac disease, as well as mass spectrometry-based proteomics analysis of clinical samples. The workplace will be split between the Institute of Immunology at Oslo University Hospital – Rikshospitalet and the Proteomics Core Facility (PCF) which in autumn 2026 will relocate to the Life Science Building which is located in close proximity to the hospital. The PCF is the main service, teaching and research hub for Proteomics in the Oslo region and is the lead node in the National network for Advanced Proteomics Infrastructure (NAPI) (www.napi.uio.no).