06 Postdoctoral Fellowship at Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Our Personalised Care in Oncology (PersOn) consortium is looking for a postdoctoral researcher in Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGMs) to work on fundamental research in Bayesian networks as well as in their application in clinical decision support. Together with other postdocs and PhD candidates from various backgrounds, you will lay the foundations for the next generation of clinical decision support systems for treatment and follow-up care in oncology. You will work closely  together with other PGM experts, as well as with researchers, health care practitioners, and stakeholders in explainable decision support. Your work will be foundational, advancing the state of the art in PGMs, as well as applied, focusing on explainability, traceability and justification in Bayesian networks to help advance shared decision making about personalised health care.

You will be embedded in the Probabilistic Graphical Models group within the Human-Centred Intelligent Systems department, where the core research lines are in foundations of stochastic computing and PGMs for clinical decision support. Ideally, your fundamental research both aligns with as well as complements the current expertise in the group. You will be expected to help define the group’s research focus and positioning at the Donders Centre for Cognition (DCC) and in the international PGM community, and to help maintain a safe and inspiring research environment for our team members. This includes co-mentoring of PhD candidates and students and contributing to diversity, equity and inclusion in the group and the department. You will have the ability to develop your teaching skills, helping you further qualify for a career as independent academic researcher.

This position is part of a project focused on developing efficient and robust models to extract quantitative biomarkers from MRI data, aiming to accelerate and enhance our ability to monitor the development of  neurodegenerative, neuro-inflammatory, and neurovascular diseases. This process will be done in direct collaboration with a targeted group of early adopters involved in clinical studies and clinical trials (contract research organisations) based in the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Switzerland.

You will lead the development and integration of neural network decoding strategies for multi-compartment relaxometry (MCR) and myelin water imaging (MWI) as a new tool for assessing brain tissue microstructure. The work will focus on enhancing computational efficiency, improving biomarker extraction, and expanding the biophysical models to include vascular tissue factors and ensure the consistency of metrics extracted at different field strengths (from 0.5 to 7 Tesla).

As a postdoctoral researcher, you will participate in a collaborative ERC-Synergy project  dedicated to understand how malaria parasites stay dormant in the liver and how their reactivation is influenced by the interaction with the host. Furthermore, you will have the opportunity to develop novel ideas and work on additional independent projects that align with this research theme.

This project will mainly be executed at the Department of Molecular Biology, including frequent visits at the other two institutes (BPRC, AmsterdamUMC). The research of our team (headed by Dr Richard Bartfai) aims at understanding how molecular mechanisms enable adaptation and support pathogenesis of malaria parasites. Our team has a strong background in the development and integration of innovative (single-cell) multi-omics technologies to understand the biology of these deadly pathogens.

The MediSpeech project emerges as a critical intervention, harnessing the potential of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and large language models (LLMs) to mitigate administrative burdens. By automating the transcription of clinical conversations and integrating sophisticated AI technologies to process and understand medical dialogue, MediSpeech aims to revolutionise healthcare interactions. This initiative not only promises to streamline administrative workflows but also to refocus healthcare professionals’ efforts on patient care, thereby enhancing the quality and timeliness of healthcare delivery. In Medispeech academia, hospital and companies will join forces.

Your main task will be to use language and speech technology such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language processing (NLP) to transcribe and linguistically enhance audiovisual recordings and texts deemed relevant for MediSpeech. The audio recordings will typically contain Dutch patient-doctor interactions from the nephrology domain. Together with our team of language and speech technology experts you will build tooling and workflows to structure speech and language data for inclusion in electronic health records.

The Pierre Auger collaboration at Radboud University (Nijmegen, Netherlands) invites applications for a postdoctoral position in high-energy astroparticle physics.

The Pierre Auger Observatory is the largest detector ever built to study ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. Situated in Malargüe (Argentina), its 3,000 km2 array of detectors has just undergone an upgrade, including the deployment of additional particle detectors as well as  antennas measuring the radio-frequency emission from air showers. This will enhance the capabilities of the observatory to determine the nature of the highest-energy particles ever observed and potentially measure with unprecedented precision the interactions caused in the atmosphere.

You will contribute by developing and testing a new analysis technique to reconstruct air shower parameters by applying interferometry on the measured radio signals. To make this work, clock synchronisation will be set up at the Pierre Auger Observatory, and the locations of detectors in the field will be accurately surveyed. You will be expected to take a leading role in these efforts. You will use the improved data to study the physics of air showers. You will be supported by and build on our group’s strong expertise in signal reconstruction and data analysis for radio detectors. Teaching is not required, but there is the possibility to participate in teaching and supervising activities.

In this project, you will work together with Dr Lieke van Maastricht (principal investigator) and a research assistant to develop and validate the first-ever open-access online tool for assessing prosodic proficiency. This innovative tool will transform how language learners, teachers, clinicians and researchers evaluate and improve critical aspects of spoken language—rhythm, stress and intonation—which are essential for clear communication and effective second-language acquisition.

Why this project matters: Accurate prosody is key to reducing foreign accents, avoiding social stigma, and enhancing mutual understanding between speakers of different languages. Despite its importance, there is currently no efficient way to assess prosodic features in language education, clinical practice or research. This project will address this gap by creating the Prosodic Proficiency Test Battery —a comprehensive tool that provides rapid, automatic assessment of prosodic accuracy. Using this tool, learners can track their progress, teachers can tailor their instruction, and researchers can explore new dimensions of language development.