Utrecht University, 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 Utrecht University, Netherlands.
Eligible candidate may Apply as soon as possible.
(01) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position: Mapping the Dynamics of Interpersonal Emotion Regulation
Why do some attempts to comfort a partner strengthen a relationship, while others backfire? In this PhD project, you will investigate how interpersonal emotion regulation unfolds between partners in daily life and over time. Using experience sampling, laboratory interaction studies, and longitudinal assessments, we aim to uncover how daily interactions, relationship dynamics, and individual differences shape emotional and relationship wellbeing, helping answer an important question: what forms of interpersonal emotion regulation work, for whom, and under which circumstances?
Deadline : 23 August 2026
(02) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD position: Develop Hybrid Machine Learning for Global Soil Mapping
Predicting ecosystem dynamics under global change requires accurate and consistent soil information at global scale. Current global soil maps are derived using empirical machine learning that often ignores known soil processes, resulting in inconsistencies across soil properties and underperformance in data-scarce regions.
This PhD project will develop next-generation machine learning methods for geospatial prediction by integrating process knowledge into modern AI tools. The research offers the opportunity to explore neural network architectures, tabular transformers or Bayes methods to include process-information into machine learning and to develop new geoAI approaches for spatiotemporal mapping usable across domains.
The project is embedded in the Computational Geography group at the Department of Physical Geography, where you will work with researchers in environmental geo-spatial AI method development, soil modelling and spatial statistics.
Deadline : 6 September 2026
View All Fully Funded PhD Positions Click Here
(03) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD: Contextual (dis)advantage and educational inequality
The PhD project will be carried out at the Department of Sociology of Utrecht University and consists of the following tasks and responsibilities:
- Conducting the research (literature review, analysing data, reporting results) resulting in international scientific publications and a dissertation;
- Presenting at national and international conferences;
- Active participation in activities of the department;
- Teaching (max. 10% of your time).
Deadline : 12 August 2026
(04) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD: Geosocial Worlds & Territorial Politics in Latin America
Drawing on recent debates in geological anthropology, this PhD project will explore how geologies can be approached as active constituents of everyday life in Latin America. It interrogates the knowability and unknowability of underground realms by examining how histories of power and forms of violence are embedded in Earth’s stratigraphies; how geosocial formations give shape to plural human–Earth relationalities; and how geological processes mediate racialised, gendered, and classed inequalities.
The PhD candidate is expected to select and follow a specific geological phenomenon, such as volcanic activity, seismicity, or critical minerals, to better understand the interconnected materialities, histories, and knowledge practices that underpin geosocial and capitalist relations. The project will examine the lived experiences of communities who engage with geologies in their everyday lives, including people living near lava deposits or under the threat of volcanic eruptions, (urban) residents of seismic risk zones, employees of geological monitoring institutions and state-led disaster risk authorities, or people involved in the extraction of critical minerals. Across these settings, the project interrogates how violence and resistance emerge through different spatial, temporal, and stratigraphic scales, and how these processes can be understood in relation to the geologies, materialities, and power relations through which landscapes and environments are transformed.
Deadline : 17 August 2026
(05) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD “Climate, Cooperation and Community in Asia”
Climate change poses a serious challenge to social cohesion in the coming decades. Extreme weather events, disruptions to food or water supplies, and the pressure to adopt new agricultural practices are already becoming increasingly visible, straining relations between people and decreasing trust in the institutions that guide collective responses. Communities are divided along existing fault lines such as those of neighbourhood, class, gender, and caste, or along new dimensions. Understanding how communities sustain or lose their ability to cooperate under climate induced pressures is an urgent question with implications for future adaptation policies around the world. In the post WWII period, rural societies in Asian countries underwent a dramatic transformation. The introduction of new agricultural technologies increased crop productivity and rural incomes. At the same time, these changes reshaped economic, political, and social power in rural communities. They also exposed farmers to new forms of climate risk. Focusing on local processes during this period allows us to trace when and why cooperation breaks down or endures, and to assess the consequences for sustainable development.
The project asks the following interlinked questions. How did climate change affect social cohesion at intra- and inter-group levels in rural Asian communities? And what can this tell us about how communities respond to climate-based disruption more generally?
These overarching questions open onto several potential research avenues, that can be pursued depending on the candidate’s interests and expertise as well as data availability. This could include research focused within or across countries, as well as across different levels and dimensions of cooperation. We expect such a project to require engagement with quantitative and qualitative sources, with the possibility of fieldwork. Through a comparative and long run study of rural Asia, the project will investigate interactions between climate, institutions and cooperative behaviour to understand the drivers of cooperation through historical analysis, with additional insight from the field of social psychology. By clarifying when cooperation succeeds or fails in historically climate-vulnerable agricultural contexts, the project offers lessons for climate adaptation in other countries around the world.
Deadline : 15 August 2026
Polite Follow-Up Email to Professor : When and How You should Write
Click here to know “How to write a Postdoc Job Application or Email”
(06) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD: ‘How Welfare States Create and Reinforce Social Deficits of Migrants’
This PhD project takes a different perspective. It starts from the idea that social networks can be supportive and, at the same time, generate social deficits: pressures, stigma, and misinformation (Offer 2021) that may undermine migrants’ economic prospects. Welfare states can play an important role by providing formal protection (Koning 2021), thus decreasing migrants’ dependency on social networks that produce social deficits (Bilecen & Barglowski 2015). Yet, little is known about the relationship between welfare states and social deficits. This project therefore asks: under what welfare-state conditions do migrants’ social networks become sources of support or deficit, and under what conditions do they reinforce economic vulnerability?
The PhD project combines comparative secondary analysis with original cross-national data collection. First, you will link data from the European Social Survey with MIPEX indicators to examine whether cross-national variation in migrant welfare rights is associated with migrants’ exposure to deficit-related economic outcomes.
Second, you will contribute to the development of a new two-wave survey in several countries. This survey will directly measure social network deficits across multiple migrant groups and enable systematic migrant-group comparisons.
Deadline : 16 August 2026
(07) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD: Imagination infrastructures & the ‘boring power’ of techniques of planning
This PhD projects starts from the question: How do planning techniques shape decisions around the governance of risk and development and the kinds of urban futures that become imaginable?
In planning, climate risk is typically framed as a technical issue to be quantified and absorbed into evaluative procedures. Tools such as cost-benefit analysis (CBA) translate uncertain futures into calculable present values, making climate vulnerability administratively manageable. This PhD research project departs from the premise that techniques of valuation are not neutral instruments. They are socio-political devices through which global logics of valuation and risk are operationalized in local planning decisions. Their effectiveness lies in their banality: the taken-for-granted procedures through which planning bureaucracies organize the future.
Valuation techniques like the CBA are sustained by “imagination infrastructures”—guidelines, standards, networks, and practices—that stabilize them as authoritative and common-sense. This PhD project interrogates their operation: how do these techniques and infrastructures preconfigure what can be imagined and negotiated in spatial planning? Tracing CBAs through global expert networks and national and local planning practices, the project seeks to unpack the ‘boring power’ of planning techniques, and to imagine alternative imagination practices and infrastructures.
The successful candidate will join an interdisciplinary research team at the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning and the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University. The team includes Dr Josje Bouwmeester , who works on urban planning negotiations, Dr Katinka Wijsman , working on politics of knowledge and valuation, and Dr Joost Vervoort , who works on transformative imagination. The project combines theoretical inquiry with empirical research into real-world planning negotiations and techniques.
Deadline : 19 August 2026
(08) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Media and Democracy in the 1970s
Across Western Europe, democracy underwent profound changes during the final decades of the twentieth century. The postwar model of democracy, characterized by institutional trust, social cohesion, and political consensus, came under pressure, giving way to a more fragmented, polarized and contested democratic order.
The postwar democratic order was closely linked to a particular model of media governance, with the public service broadcasting monopoly at its core. But in subsequent decades, debates about the role, organization, and regulation of media became a key arena in which democratic ideals and institutions were contested and (re-)formed. The NWO-funded VIDI project Democracy and the (de-)regulation of the media examines democracy’s contestation and transformation in the final quarter of the twentieth century through the lens of media governance.
Through a comparative Western European perspective, the project investigates how social movements, interest organisations, regulators and policy makers and their conceptions and practices of democracy shaped media governance reform from the 1970s to the 2000s. This enables us to understand the foundations of the liberalized and pluralized media model of the final quarter of the twentieth century and of the regulation of digital media which stand at the heart of concerns about democracy’s crisis today.
Deadline : 6 September 2026
Click here to know “How to Write an Effective Cover Letter”
(09) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD: Characterization of subsurface heterogeneity in backward erosion (piping)
The Netherlands relies on a network of about 2,000 km of river dikes to contain flooding in its floodplains. These dikes undergo continuous assessment, maintenance, and reinforcement to uphold the highest safety standards. A major risk to dike stability is Backward Erosion Piping (BEP): groundwater flow underneath a dike entrains sand particles, eroding the base of the dike. Current BEP risk assessments weigh uncertainties conservatively and simplify the interactions between subsurface heterogeneity, 3D groundwater flow and BEP. To make risk assessments of BEP more realistic it is therefore necessary to get a better grip on these interactions, but also to make sure that uncertainties are propagated in a sound and robust way. The envisaged PhD candidate shall investigate optimal ways to schematize and parameterize the subsurface at local to regional scales to assess dike safety using geological and geohydrological data and models, for characteristic fluvial landscapes in the Netherlands.
UU is offering this PhD position within the Digital Dikes project, funded by NWO-TTW. The Digital Dikes project is a consortium project between Twente University, Delft University, Utrecht University, Deltares Research Institute, industrial and governmental national and international partners. The project aligns their various research lines into BEP and risk assessment for dikes.
For this PhD research, we seek a highly motivated PhD candidate who is eager to face the challenge of subsurface characterization and contribute to improved dike safety. You will develop advanced digital models of the subsurface architecture (i.e. hydrogeological schematizations) that encompass the 3D variability in geohydrological properties. These models are to be validated using real-world monitoring data (e.g. on sand boils), and used in 3D groundwater flow simulations to predict BEP potential occurrence spatially. For this you can draw on the Dept. of Physical Geography’s unique expertise on geomorphology, geology and geohydrology of the Dutch river delta, embanked floodplains and flood-protected polders.
Deadline : 10 August 2026
(10) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD position in practical implementation of nature-based solutions
To have successful NbS projects (specifically sediment based NbS – such as sedimentation enhancing strategies), we need to identify and overcome major practical challenges in their implementation. This includes the physical capabilities of NbS to create and maintain new land and ecosystems, the usability of these new areas for different purposes, possibilities for integration with existing grey infrastructure and how NbS projects are practically implemented with stakeholders (including successes and challenges).
You will explore critical challenges faced by NbS namely: 1) delivery of sediment and spatial patterns of sedimentation, 2) quality of sediment delivered and possibilities for other land uses, 3) synergy with existing infrastructure and 4) social acceptance of NbS.
The types of NbS considered are salt marshes, tidal mudflats, and retention basins, which have the capacity to create land, buffer flooding, and store water while delivering ecological and societal benefits. Examples include the Rammegors wetland, the Perkpolder and Wisselpolders.
Your research will focus on understanding the role of extreme events in shaping coastal landscapes, including the importance of storm delivered sediment in annual land building and whether storm surge barriers can hinder or enhance this process.
Deadline : 31 August 2026
Connect with Us for Latest Job updates
(11) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD: Understanding the politicization of university knowledge and education
University science and education are in the midst of a storm: political developments and new, more confrontational forms of knowledge politicization have entered the realms of academic research and education. Political movements are increasingly challenging academia through questioning university collaboration between nations with different political orientations, research on specific emerging technologies and collaborations with societal partners. But some also question the use of certain terminology, and even disciplinary legitimacy. At the same time, students are raising questions about the societal roles and responsibilities of universities.
How should we understand these new ways in which universities are politicized? What does this tell us about evolving relations between science and society? How should teachers and educational programmes deal with such politicization? And how can conversations about politicization be facilitated in meaningful ways in the classroom? Are there specific didactics, or methods for deliberation and facilitation of sensitive topic discussions that could improve geoscience education in a politicized context?
We are seeking a motivated and talented researcher for this PhD project to study the new and growing politicizations of science and how to address them in academic education. The project will focus on the geosciences, where these developments are highly potent. Since geosciences includes both social sciences and natural sciences disciplines, the plurality of politicizations is especially high. Furthermore, geosciences faculties are especially active in research and education related to sustainability, one of the most increasingly politicized knowledge domains. Therefore, understanding new politicizations of geoscientific knowledge in research and education will be key in understanding the broader phenomenon. It also provides the perfect testcase to develop didactic tools to address these politicizations in the classroom.
Deadline : 27 July 2026
Polite Follow-Up Email to Professor : When and How You should Write
About Utrecht University, Netherlands – Official Website
Utrecht University is a public research university in Utrecht, Netherlands. Established 26 March 1636 (385 years ago), it is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands. In 2018, it had an enrolment of 31,801 students, and employed 7,191 faculty and staff. In 2018, 525 PhD degrees were awarded and 6,948 scientific articles were published. The 2018 budget of the university was €857 million.
Utrecht University counts a number of distinguished scholars among its alumni and faculty, including 12 Nobel Prize laureates and 13 Spinoza Prize laureates. Utrecht University has been placed consistently in the top 100 universities in the world by prominent international ranking tables. The university is ranked the best university in the Netherlands by the Shanghai Ranking of World Universities 2019, ranking 13th in Europe and 49th in the world.
The university’s motto is “Sol Iustitiae Illustra Nos,” which means “May the Sun of Righteousness Enlighten Us”. This motto was gleaned from a literal Latin Bible translation of Malachi 4:2. Rutgers University, having historical connections with Utrecht University, uses a modified version of this motto.
Utrecht University is led by the University Board, consisting of prof. dr. Henk Kummeling (Rector Magnificus), prof. dr. Anton Pijpers (Chair) and prof. mr. Annetje Ottow (Vice Chair).
Close ties are harboured with other institutions internationally through its membership in the League of European Research Universities (LERU), the Utrecht Network and the European University Association (EUA).
Disclaimer: We try to ensure that the information we post on VacancyEdu.com is accurate. However, despite our best efforts, some of the content may contain errors. You can trust us, but please conduct your own checks too.
Related Posts
