21 PhD Degree-Fully Funded at University of Antwerp, Belgium

• You will work actively on the preparation and defence of a PhD thesis in the field of electrode and reactor engineering within the recently granted path 3 Moonshot project (see also https://www.moonshotflanders.be/en/research/path-3-electrification-radical-process-transformation) EFFORT – development of GDE-MEA for CO2-electrolysis with low anolyte c The broader scope is developing the technologies that are needed to enable the large deployment of CO2 electrolyzers on the market. In particular, it is ambitioning to achieve high performance devices that are able to operate under an absolute voltage of 2.5 V at 200 mA cm-². More specifically, you will devise strategies for mitigating salt precipitation via innovative GDE and electrolyzer design. The aim is to establish the critical reactor operating parameters (water supply, pulsing, etc.) to avoid salt deposition to a maximum and as such increase the durability of a typical zero gap CO2 electrolyzer.
• You will publish scientific articles and/or patents related to the research project.
• As a PhD student of ELCAT you also support a part of the general research and teaching tasks to support the good day-to-day functioning of the research group and the Faculty of Applied Engineering.
• You are also co-responsible for the safety in the research labs, in particular with regard to gases and chemicals.

• You will work actively on the preparation of a PhD thesis in the context of the research project ‘Webcare through the eyes of the bystander: A cross-linguistic comparison of pragmatic-rhetorical features in hotel review-response interactions’, funded by the FWO – Research Foundation Flanders. Your focus will be on the automatic analysis of multilingual online customer service communication. You will participate in a cross-linguistic study on a multilingual corpus of hotel reviews and the corresponding responses. You will investigate cross-linguistic features of hotel interactions in these languages, using computational methods. Furthermore, you will investigate possibilities to develop generative AI systems that can generate automatic responses, tailored to the linguistic and cultural context.
• You will publish scientific articles related to the research project.

• You will work actively on the preparation of a PhD thesis in the context of the research project ‘Webcare through the eyes of the bystander: A cross-linguistic comparison of pragmatic-rhetorical features in hotel review-response interactions’, funded by the FWO – Research Foundation Flanders. Your focus will be on the analysis of multilingual online customer service communication. You will participate in a cross-linguistic study on a multilingual corpus of hotel reviews and the corresponding responses. You will investigate cross-linguistic features and rhetorical strategies of hotel interactions in these languages. Furthermore, you will conduct experimental research to identify which features and strategies are perceived as positive or negative by potential hotel guests.

• You will work actively on the preparation of a PhD thesis in the context of the research project ‘Emotions without borders: Studying the verbalization and automatic detection of emotions across languages’. In this project, you will investigate and compare emotional language use in different languages using methods from computational linguistics. The focus is on automatic emotion detection in text, with special attention to crosslingual differences in emotion verbalization and to how multilingual models deal with such differences.
• You will publish scientific articles related to the research project and will present your findings at national and international conferences.

The A-PECS research group at the Department of Bioscience Engineering in the Faculty of Science and the EnvEcon research team at the Department of Engineering Management in the Faculty of Business and Economics are looking for a full-time (100%) doctoral scholarship holder in the field of Design, upscaling and optimization of environmentally friendly and economically viable photo-electrochemical technologies

The PhD research project is conducted in collaboration with the MovAnt research group (Prof. Sebastiaan Dalle), the Laboratory of Experimental Medicine and Pediatrics (Prof. Annelies Van Eyck) and the laboratory of Physiopharmacology (Prof. Pieter-Jan Guns).

This PhD project aims to uncover the unexplored role of the endocannabinoid (eCB) system in systemic and peripheral metabolic and inflammatory adaptations following exercise (in obesity). Methodological approaches include 1) a murine (diet-induced obesity) model, 2) acute and chronic exercise paradigms, 3) treatment with peripherally restricted enzyme-based eCB modulators, 4) multi-tissue molecular analyses and 5) functional assays of in vivo metabolism and exercise capacity. This project will generate a multi-tissue eCB atlas in response to acute exercise & obesity, taking into account sexual dimorphism, and fundamental insights in the mechanisms that underlie acute and chronic metabolic and inflammatory exercise adaptations (in obesity).

• You will actively prepare and defend a PhD thesis in the field of vaccine immunology with a specific focus on omics approaches to vaccine responses. You will actively participate in dissecting systemic and mucosal immunology, evaluating unique samples from participants enrolled in human in vivo challenge studies. The PhD project will explore systemic and mucosal immune mechanisms in response to challenge agents or vaccination, using cutting-edge technologies to identify molecular signatures and pathways involved in protective or dysregulated immunity.
• You will publish scientific articles related to the research project.
• You will carry out a limited number of teaching and research support tasks for Vaccinopolis.

• You will work actively on the preparation and defence of a PhD thesis in the field of immuno-oncology, with a focus on Dendritic Cell (DC)-based immunotherapy in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). The objective of this project is to decipher PDAC patients’ immunological responsiveness to DC-based immunotherapy by performing in-depth immunomonitoring to understand the potential molecular and immune mechanisms underlining the effect of the vaccine within the unique context of a first-in-human phase I clinical trial. The outcome of this project paves the way to optimize and implement DC-based immunotherapy in the context of hard-to-treat pancreatic cancer as it is important to further explore the place of this treatment modality in a rationally designed multi-modal treatment strategy, targeted at overcoming the immunosuppressive nature of PDAC.
• You will publish scientific articles related to the research project.
• You will carry out a limited number of teaching support tasks in the module ‘Oncology’ (Master of Medicine) and the module ‘Molecular Oncology’ in (Master of Biomedical Sciences).

Growing evidence suggests that allergic immune responses in the gut can influence the brain, but how these signals are transmitted and whether they contribute to brain disorders remains unclear. This project explores how food allergy during early life alters the gut microbiota, reprograms immune cells, and promotes their trafficking to the brain, ultimately triggering neuroinflammation. The PhD student will help uncover the molecular and cellular pathways linking the allergic gut to the inflamed brain, and how these pathways shape disease risk later in life.

The successful candidate will work closely with experts in food allergy, neuroimmunology, gut physiology, and computational biology to characterize immune cell responses, construct spatial maps of inflammation along the gut-brain axis, and identify immune-mediated drivers of brain dysfunction.

• You will join our vibrant team to work on a challenging and exciting project at the intersection of genetics, epigenetics, computational biology and neuroscience with a specific focus on adult neurogenesis. Adult neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus (DG) plays an essential role in normal cognitive function including in memory formation, learning, pattern separation and mood regulation. Adult neurogenesis is vital for brain repair following traumatic brain injury and is disrupted in neurodegenerative disorders. In the DG, neural stem cells (NSCs) transition from a quiescent to an active state, giving rise to neural intermediate progenitor cells which then go on to produce neuroblasts and ultimately new neurons. The molecular mechanisms underlying such state transition remain poorly understood. We hypothesise that quiescent NSCs exist in distinct states, distinguishable at the level of chromatin states and 3D chromatin organisation, and that changes in chromatin organisation coordinate the transition from quiescence to self-renewal. The aim of this project is to investigate this hypothesis using a combination of state-of-the-art experimental omics technologies and integrative computational approaches.
• You will write several scientific articles on this research project and present your work at the national and international conferences.
• You will contribute to other research directions in the lab.
• You will carry out a number of teaching activities (from the 3^rd year) and research support tasks at the University of Antwerp.

The overall goal of this PhD is to develop novel biosensing strategies that will pave the way to the construction of affordable, robust, and user-friendly platforms. The main focus will be on amplified singlet oxygen-based photoelectroanalysis for nucleic acid-based biomarkers in healthcare applications (e.g. cancer diagnosis and infectious disease diagnostics). This PhD will contribute to the efforts of getting insight into yet unexplored biosensing and signal amplification strategies.

(18) PhD Degree – Fully Funded

PhD position summary/title: : Doctoral scholarship holder applied mathematics: statistics

Deadline : June 12, 2025

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The A-PECS research group at the Department of Bioscience Engineering in the Faculty of Science and the EnvEcon research team at the Department of Engineering Management in the Faculty of Business and Economics are looking for a full-time (100%) doctoral scholarship holder in the field of Design, upscaling and optimization of environmentally friendly and economically viable photo-electrochemical technologies

We are seeking for a motivated and talented PhD student to develop model-based reconstruction methods for quantitative super-resolution perfusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Specifically, you will develop model-based image reconstruction methods for quantitative arterial spin labeling (ASL) MRI images. ASL is a promising, non-invasive perfusion magnetic resonance imaging technique for quantifying cerebral blood flow (CBF). Unfortunately, ASL suffers from an inherently low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and spatial resolution, undermining its potential. Increasing spatial resolution without significantly sacrificing SNR or scan time represents a critical challenge towards routine (pre)clinical use. In this PhD research, you will develop model-based super-resolution reconstruction methods for accelerated and quantitative high-resolution ASL MRI, thereby breaking the traditional SNR/resolution/scan-time trade-off. Alongside purely physics-based models, you will explore physics-informed deep learning approaches.

We wish to hire a joint doctoral student who will be working in both groups (50% at UAntwerp, 50% at KU Leuven ) for the full duration of this project, who will be closely assisted by two postdoctoral fellows, based respectively at A-PECS (UAntwerp) and QSP (KU Leuven). The hired PhD student will be in charge of producing clusters in the gas phase, depositing them on the titania nanotubes and SiO₂, and studying their ex situ structural and electronic properties at QSP-KU Leuven. The morphological engineering of the titania nanotube substrates is also one of their tasks. They will participate in the in situ /operando XANES/EXAFS measurements using in-house cells at the Swiss Light Source (SLS) and at the European Synchrotron (ESRF) and analyse the results. They will perform Nano Raman/SERS experiments and investigate the photochemical properties of the cluster-substrate system using an automated photocatalytic gas test setup for CO₂ photoreduction available at A-PECS. Importantly, the PhD candidate will thus receive a joint PhD degree by both UAntwerp and KU Leuven.