Postdoctoral Fellowship (12) at University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

The goal of the research is to conduct doctrinal, normative, theoretical and empirical research into the trustworthiness safeguards of digital identity systems, and translate those insights into concrete governance frameworks. In the process we plan to identify a set of independently verifiable safeguards (legal, technical, economic, and governance‐based) that make a digital identity system stack trustworthy; and design and execute qualitative and preferably quantitative empirical studies to measure the relationship between the objective trustworthiness safeguards and their relationship to users’ subjectively placed (dis)trust in the technology.

To help addressing these questions, we are looking for a postdoc with several years of experience in doing interdisciplinary research at the intersection of information law, digital technologies, (preferably digital identity systems), trust and trustworthiness, and technology governance. Your role will be to help manage the UvA contributions to the consortium, and conduct research within the trustworthiness safeguards related work package, in close cooperation with the other work packages. You will also actively help building the consortium and cooperation across work packages.

We are looking for a part-time (fixed-term, 0,8fte) Post-doctoral researcher with focus on Financial colonial history and an expertise in archives. The position is available for 18 months within the project COLFIN. COLFIN analyses the colonial durabilities in modern financial infrastructures. The aim of COLFIN is to understand and analyse how the experimental beginnings and development of financial instruments were shaped by and through colonial exploitation and appropriation. The longer time horizons, transnational payments and novel uncertainties of colonial expansion and exploitation are at the heart of modern financial innovation. The approach of COLFIN is to focus on financial infrastructures, understood as socio-technical and historically durable ways of organizing political-economic life. 

This successful candidate will help develop COLFIN’s methodological approach, with a focus on colonial archives, archival methods and the ethics of research with colonial archives. Methodologically, COLFIN works with newly digitized archives of early modern public-private colonial companies, including for example the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the English East India Company (EIC). This postdoctoral project asks how archives are digitalized, how they are made accessible, what gaps and silences are at work and what ethical questions are at play. The successful candidate will contribute to developing COLFIN’s research protocol and practical and ethical approach to the colonial archives.

The successful candidate will join an interdisciplinary research project (SUSGREEN, see below) and obtain employment at the Economics and Business faculty of University of Amsterdam. The position will primarily be located at the Strategy and International Business (SIB) section at the Amsterdam Business School (ABS), with a strong secondary affiliation at the Microeconomics section at the Amsterdam School of Economics (ASE).

To get a good understanding of the nascent technology focal for the work, the postdoc will also engage with personnel at the Faculty of Science and with relevant industry partners in SUSGREEN (Sustainable Fuels from Carbon Dioxide Using Integrated Green Technologies), an innovation-oriented EU project led by dr. Shiju Raveendran at the The Catalysis Engineering Group, UvA Van ‘t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences. The SUSGREEN project aims to offer a scalable pathway for CO₂ valorization and thereby contribute to Europe’s transition to sustainable fuels.

The postdoc will be supervised by dr. Siri Boe-Lillegraven (Associate professor at the Amsterdam Business School) and dr. Natalie Lee (Assistant professor at the Amsterdam School of Economics). This position contributes directly to SUSGREEN’s WP7: Social and Market Impact of the New Technology. In terms of the research output, the main aim is to – in addition to dissemination within the broader project team and to other relevant stakeholders – publish the insights in high-quality outlets within economics, business, and/or organization studies.

This postdoc position is part of an interdisciplinary project exploring chip-security in globalised value chains. The security of devices has gradually become more “infrastructural,” as it intertwines and relies upon cryptographic components and circuitry that are implemented in end devices. Moreover, soft/hardware design, production, assembly, and security evaluation happen across global supply chains, and regional differences in security certification schemes. This raises numerous legal, social, and political economy questions, complicating power dynamics over digital infrastructures, blurring the web of liabilities and responsibilities, all amidst growing geopolitical volatility. Against this background, how does security evaluation fit practically and legally into global supply chains? How does it interact with dominant actors and forces in the semiconductor and electronics industry, with states, national, regional, and/or international organizations?

We develop the missing theoretical framework that captures these consequences and research based on a multi-method approach strategic climate litigation in 4 national (Germany, France, Netherlands & UK) and 2 European jurisdictions (EU & European Court of Human Rights), how strategic climate litigation interacts with the democratic process and how its (neglected) democratic potential could be realized. 

The postdoctoral researcher, together with the principal investigator, develop the focus of the research project and identify relevant issues to be further pursued and research these issues independently and jointly. The expected output consists both of individual and co-authored publications.

The Catalysis Engineering group is looking for a motivated researcher to be employed in a project for the recycling or treating different waste (solid, dissolved or gaseous). The project involves industrial partners and hence, collaborative work is important to reach the objective of this project. The candidate joining the project is expected to have experience in chemical engineering/applied chemistry with specialization in catalysis. Experience in operating high-temperature, high-pressure batch reactors and/or flow reactors is needed.  You will join a collaborative team of chemists, engineers, and materials scientists working together to design and develop sustainable chemical processes. We offer a stimulating environment where curiosity, passion, and scientific rigor drive our research forward, and we ask for a strong passion for scientific research and for contributing to society through innovative technologies from you.

The position offers an inspiring research environment with access to advanced catalytic synthesis and reactor testing facilities, as well as opportunities for collaboration with industrial partners.

We are looking for a candidate with strong scientific curiosity, enthusiasm for research, and a passion for contributing to society through innovative and sustainable technologies.

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 postdoc you will lead research on physics-informed (and physics-grounded) world models and agents: how to consolidate and transfer physical knowledge into learning systems for the real world. Physics engines and physics-informed neural networks are powerful, but the open problems are exactly where they stop being sufficient — under partial observation, in complex regimes that demand orders-of-magnitude speed-up, and where knowledge must transfer across embodiments, scenes and scientific domains. This is where world models earn their keep.