University of Amsterdam, Netherlands invites online Application for number of Fully Funded PhD Degree at various Departments. We are providing a list of Fully Funded PhD Programs available at University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Eligible candidate may Apply as soon as possible.
(01) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position Urban Utopias and Urban Policy in Amsterdam
Are you curious about current utopian initiatives in Amsterdam countering profit-centred urban development? Do you want to investigate bottom-up housing projects seeking to carve out different ways to live, work, care, and foster community and sustainability in the city? Join this PhD project and conduct qualitative research on such initiatives, contributing to theoretical and policy debates on alternative urban futures.
Deadline : 01-09-2026
(02) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position Navigating Labour and Housing Precarity in Amsterdam
This PhD project explores the critical yet underexplored nexus between labour and housing precarity across different industries and tenure forms in Amsterdam. The central question is how labour migrants experience, navigate, and challenge these intersecting forms of precarity within and across their (often changing) everyday geographies of work, home, social reproduction, and the travel between these spaces. The research aims to translate labour migrants’ lived experiences into practical recommendations for policy and governance at the city level and beyond.
To capture the everyday lived experiences of labour migrants in the context of labour and housing precarity, the PhD candidate is expected to deploy ethnographic research methods, such as in-depth interviews, participant observations, and focus groups. Finally, the ideal candidate should demonstrate a strong commitment to urban impact. They are expected to involve key stakeholders active in the field of precarious housing and labour. This may include national labour unions (such as FNV and CNV), policymakers of the municipality of Amsterdam, labour rights organisations (FairWork), and city-based social support groups (such as De Regenboog Groep).
Deadline : 01-09-2026
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(03) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: Two PhD Positions in Anthropology on Urban Issues in Amsterdam
We offer two PhD positions for anthropological research on urban issues that makes an academic contribution and is relevant to solving social challenges in Amsterdam. The project should be both solid and innovative academically, and incorporate practice-based concerns and questions in its design. The programme aims to promote social science with the city. Whether working with activists or policymakers, medical doctors or social workers, the goal is to learn from local partners and work alongside them.
Within these parameters, the topic to be researched is open, as long as the projects relate to urban issues and clearly articulate their societal value for the city and those who help shape it. We particularly encourage project proposals on the following themes: disability and mobility; living with intellectual disabilities; diversity and inequality in the city; young people’s views and practices of sexuality; progressive municipal politics in an age of polarization; green energy and the Port of Amsterdam.
Deadline : 01-09-2026
(04) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position Negotiating Democracy in Amsterdam
Do you have a passion for researching contestation and local democracy? We now have the opportunity for you to join this PhD project that explores how the municipality of Amsterdam, social movements and civil society organisations negotiate local democracy. You will work in close collaboration with the municipality, activists and citizen initiatives to study the fault lines of contemporary democratic life in the city.
Deadline : 01-09-2026
(05) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position Strategising for the Green Transition in Amsterdam
Climate change is a key driver of major urban transitions. This PhD project is premised on the idea that these transitions require long-term strategic planning to provide a stable context for investment, create coherence in new infrastructure at the urban and regional levels, and coordinate with other forms of urban development. The goal of the project is to understand how the urban governance systems of actors, rules, and powers enable or constrain cities’ ability to plan for the future. Therefore, the system in which planning decisions regarding climate-proofing the city are made should be well understood to identify the factors that lead to the success or failure of long-term planning.
The research design centres on key decisions regarding urban transitions aimed at mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. An approach in which Amsterdam is compared with cities pursuing ambitious green transition agendas will be part of the research design.
A provisional formulation of the central questions of the project is: How do governance arrangements enable or constrain Amsterdam’s long-term strategies for green urban transitions? What can Amsterdam do to improve the strategic capacity of its governance system by learning from international examples?
The project will focus on a particular problem associated with green urban transitions, such as the development of an energy cluster in the Amsterdam harbour, the expansion of the urban heat network, urban greening for extreme weather conditions (heat and rain), urban greening for biodiversity, or electrification to decarbonise housing and industry.
Deadline : 01-09-2026
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(06) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position The Rule of Law from Below
Interested in understanding how communities try to access their rights and seek justice in the city? Keen to test your qualitative research skills and try out experimental methods? Then apply for this PhD project which will explore how urban residents and civil society groups defend, shape and reinvent the rule of law from below in their interactions with municipal authorities.
Deadline : 01-09-2026
(07) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position Local Democracy and Underrepresented Communities in Amsterdam
This PhD project examines how local democracy is experienced and shaped within diverse communities in Amsterdam, against a backdrop of growing urban political inequality in which some groups remain structurally underrepresented and less connected to political participation and representation.
The central question is how people within underrepresented communities develop: (1) strategies for political participation (both formal and informal), (2) democratic publics, and (3) reflexivity: the capacity to reflect on their own political position, their communities, and their relationship to broader democratic processes such as voting and (experienced) political representation.
The project examines how underrepresented communities develop political participation, democratic publics, and reflexivity, with particular attention to migration-rooted communities in multicultural Amsterdam and questions of representation and belonging. It investigates how publics emerge around shared concerns, experiences, and initiatives in both offline and online settings, and how digital environments shape new forms of engagement, interaction, and collective reflection. By focusing on these dynamics, the project aims to generate insights that contribute to broader debates on urban democracy, inclusion, and political participation beyond Amsterdam.
Deadline : 01-09-2026
(08) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD position on populist speech in EU parliamentary committees 1980 – 2000
Are you interested in how political disagreement and the tone of debate has changed in EU committees? Would you like to engage in qualitative research into the rise of populism at the end of the 20th century, and develop your skills as an independent researcher? In this PhD position you will work in an interdisciplinary team studying changes in the sound of political disagreement over the last two centuries.
Deadline : 19-08-2026
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(09) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Candidate in AI-driven 3D spheroid modelling for lymphoma research
We are seeking a motivated PhD candidate to join our interdisciplinary team bridging experimental in vitro work, clinical data and AI-driven modelling for cancer research!
In this role, you will bridge the gap between machine learning, computational biology, and haematological oncology. You do not need to arrive as an expert in modelling: what matters most is your passion for human physiology, your curiosity about cancer cells behaviour, and your willingness to develop new computational skills along the way.
This position is genuinely interdisciplinary: you will collaborate daily with experimental biologists and clinicians at Amsterdam UMC, and computational biologist/AI experts at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). The heart of this project is to understand how tumor cells interact with their microenvironment, how drugs disrupt those interactions, and answering those questions by developing computational tools.
Deadline : 30-07-2026
(10) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD position on protest and political speech in the Nordics, 1930-1970
We are looking for an ambitious PhD student who will study the practice of political speech and the articulation of protest by Nordic labour unions in the 20th century.Currently, we seem to observe a rise in the polarization of political opinion, accompanied by a hardening of the tone of political discourse and decreased mutual understanding between different ideological ‘bubbles’. Our project, The Sound of Disagreement: Embodied Histories of Political Speech 1800-present, seeks to historicize this (perceived) recent culture war, and to draw attention to the development and co-existence of different modes of disagreement in the past two centuries.
The team will study how different groups of newcomers to political speech (be they women, working class activists or populist representatives) navigated the challenges of making themselves heard without being perceived as excessive or intrusive. We analyse how political actors managed disagreement at a practical level, and how embodied and affective experiences of disagreement were shaped. Members of the team will each contribute expertise and empirical insights from their respective case studies to contribute to an over-arching long-term study of the sonic practices of political debate in Europe.
Deadline : 20-08-2026
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(11) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Candidate in Mechanism-Informed World Models and Agents
World models are controllable, physics- and mechanism-grounded simulators of reality: they let an agent rehearse the consequences of its actions thousands of times before it acts in the real world. Paired with agents that plan, reason and act inside them, they are emerging as the substrate of Physical AI — and they cut across domains that look different on the surface but share the same scientific core: a robot rehearsing a manipulation task in a digital twin, and a biomedical model simulating how a tumour responds to therapy across biological scales, are both betting that structure beats brute scale.
In this PhD you will develop mechanism-informed world models: models that do not merely predict the next frame, but discover the underlying events, causes and temporal relationships that drive change — and expose them as controllable, intervenable structure. The question is not only “what happens next?” but “what are the latent actions and mechanisms, and how do we tokenize, learn and steer them in a controllable manner?” This is one of the least-explored and most consequential frontiers in Physical AI.
Deadline : 20-08-2026
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(12) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position in Physical Chemistry: Time-Resolved Spectroscopy of Multichromophoric Systems
Join us in pushing the frontiers of molecular photophysics and gain hands-on experience with state-of-the-art spectroscopic techniques. Apply today and help reveal the principles that govern energy conversion at the molecular scale. Using advanced spectroscopic techniques, you will investigate charge separation, charge transport, and energy-transfer dynamics in multichromophoric molecular systems, generating the fundamental knowledge needed to design the next generation of organic materials for energy conversion and light-driven technologies.
Deadline : 15-09-2026
(13) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD in Quantum Algorithms for Chemistry
In this PhD, you will develop quantum algorithms for the simulation of molecular systems on digital quantum computers. You will study their behaviour analytically and numerically and identify the classes of problems where they can make a genuine scientific difference. Research directions might include identifying new approaches to molecular simulation, adapting existing quantum simulation algorithms to the early fault-tolerant era, and developing machine‑learning and AI‑based strategies to integrate quantum and classical simulation algorithms.
You will join a new interdisciplinary research environment connecting the HIMS computational chemistry group, the Computational Science Lab at the Institute for Informatics, and QuSoft. You will also be part of the national “Quantum Computing for Quantum Chemistry” collaboration (QC2).
Deadline : 20-07-2026
(14) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position in Synthetic Organic and Organometallic Chemistry
Do you want to help shape the future of chemical synthesis? We are looking for a highly motivated PhD candidate to join a newly funded NWO project focused on developing catalytic cascade C–H activation reactions for the rapid construction of complex molecular ring systems. Working at the interface of synthetic organic chemistry, organometallic catalysis, ligand design, and mechanistic studies, you will develop new palladium-catalysed transformations and uncover the fundamental principles that govern their reactivity and selectivity. Your research will contribute to the development of efficient synthetic methods relevant to pharmaceuticals and fine chemicals.
Deadline :01-08-2026
(15) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: Two PhD Positions on Linking Mountain Building and Biodiversity in the Northern Andes (PhD-2)
The HUMBOLDT project explores the links between mountain building and biodiversity in the Northern Andes, one of the most biodiverse mountain systems on Earth. Climate and habitat richness alone cannot fully explain why some mountain ranges are exceptionally diverse. HUMBOLDT therefore tests whether and how mountain uplift helped drive speciation and biodiversity. To answer this question, the project aims to reconstruct the topographic evolution of the Northern Andes at high resolution by integrating geological data, topographic analysis, and landscape evolution modelling. These reconstructions will then be compared with biodiversity and speciation data from ecologists.
We are recruiting two closely connected PhD candidates. PhD-1 will focus on generating geological constraints on landscape evolution through fieldwork, laboratory analyses, and data interpretation. PhD-2 will focus on developing and applying numerical and inverse models to reconstruct paleo-topography and link these reconstructions to biodiversity patterns. The two PhD candidates will work as an integrated team and collaborate with partners in Colombia, Germany, and Switzerland. Depending on your background and interests, you may indicate a preference for PhD-1, PhD-2, or both positions. This is the official application page for PhD-2. If you prefer to apply for PhD-1, please use this link to access the corresponding application page.
Deadline : 30-08-2026
(16) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: Two PhD Positions on Linking Mountain Building and Biodiversity in the Northern Andes (PhD-1)
The HUMBOLDT project explores the links between mountain building and biodiversity in the Northern Andes, one of the most biodiverse mountain systems on Earth. Climate and habitat richness alone cannot fully explain why some mountain ranges are exceptionally diverse. HUMBOLDT therefore tests whether and how mountain uplift helped drive speciation and biodiversity. To answer this question, the project aims to reconstruct the topographic evolution of the Northern Andes at high resolution by integrating geological data, topographic analysis, and landscape evolution modelling. These reconstructions will then be compared with biodiversity and speciation data from ecologists.
We are recruiting two closely connected PhD candidates. PhD-1 will focus on generating geological constraints on landscape evolution through fieldwork, laboratory analyses, and data interpretation. PhD-2 will focus on developing and applying numerical and inverse models to reconstruct paleo-topography and link these reconstructions to biodiversity patterns. The two PhD candidates will work as an integrated team and collaborate with partners in Colombia, Germany, and Switzerland. Depending on your background and interests, you may indicate a preference for PhD-1, PhD-2, or both positions. This is the official application page for PhD-1. If you prefer to apply for PhD-2, please use this link to access the corresponding application page.
Deadline : 30-08-2026
(17) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position in Ultrafast electron microscopy and spectroscopy of quantum materials
Follow electrons in quantum materials in real time! Do you see yourself pushing the envelope with a next-generation Ultrafast Transmission Electron Microscope (UTEM) to directly image physical processes happening on insanely short timescales?
Deadline : 30-07-2026
About University of Amsterdam, Netherlands –Official Website
The University of Amsterdam is a public research university located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The UvA is one of two large, publicly funded research universities in the city, the other being the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU). Established in 1632 by municipal authorities and later renamed for the city of Amsterdam, the University of Amsterdam is the third-oldest university in the Netherlands. It is one of the largest research universities in Europe with 31,186 students, 4,794 staff, 1,340 PhD students and an annual budget of €600 million. It is the largest university in the Netherlands by enrollment. The main campus is located in central Amsterdam, with a few faculties located in adjacent boroughs. The university is organised into seven faculties: Humanities, Social and Behavioural Sciences, Economics and Business, Science, Law, Medicine, Dentistry.
The University of Amsterdam has produced six Nobel Laureates and five prime ministers of the Netherlands. The University of Amsterdam has been placed in the top 100 universities in the world by five major ranking tables. By the QS World University Rankings it was ranked 61st in the world, 14th in Europe, and 2nd in the Netherlands in 2021. The university was placed in the top 50 worldwide in seven fields in the 2011 QS World University Rankings in the fields of linguistics, sociology, philosophy, geography, science, Economics and econometrics, and accountancy and finance. In 2018 and 2019 the two departments of Media and Communication were commonly ranked 1st in the world by subject by QS Ranking.
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