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 in Analytical Mass Spectrometry-Based Immunopeptidomics/Proteomics
Our team studies peptides presented on Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) complexes on the surface of cells, which are recognised by the immune system. These peptides can trigger targeted immune responses to clear infections and tumors or contribute to autoimmune diseases. Identifying disease-driving HLA-bound peptides is crucial for selecting novel targets for immunotherapies.
This project focuses on developing highly sensitive and alternative immunopeptidomics/proteomics workflows, including sample preparation, chromatography, mass spectrometry acquisition, fragmentation, and data analysis. The goal is to enhance the detection of HLA class I and II peptides, both with and without post-translational modifications. Additionally, the project aims to optimise biochemical and bioinformatic quantitative strategies to improve the selection of HLA-bound tumour-specific antigens. You will also collaborate with laboratories within Oncode and the Princess Máxima Institute.
Deadline : 1 May 2025
(02) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position in Neurotoxicology
We are seeking an enthusiastic and creative PhD candidate to join the Neurotoxicology Research Group within the Toxicology division
. Our division is dedicated to advancing the scientific foundation of chemical risk assessment through innovative research, teaching, and training in mechanistic and predictive toxicology. Comprising four research groups (Endocrine Toxicology, Immune Toxicology, Neurotoxicology, and Exposure Assessment), we conduct fundamental and applied research to understand the effects of toxic substances on biological systems.
As a PhD candidate, you will work on the project “Dissecting Brain Pollutant Exposure and its Contribution to Neurodegeneration and Alzheimer’s Disease: From Signatures to Prevention Strategies to Protect and Maintain a Healthy Brain.” This project is part of a collaborative effort with 10 European partners to assess the role of environmental chemicals in the development of neurodegenerative diseases.
While it is well-known that certain environmental pollutants can have adverse effects on brain, including the development of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), the underlying mechanisms and sensitive exposure windows are still largely unknown. To address this gap, you will identify environmental pollutants likely to reach the brain using in vitro models for the blood-brain-barrier. You will investigate which of these pollutants have neurotoxic effects and pro-amyloidogenic properties predictive of a neurodegenerative trajectory related to AD using in vitro screening assays, such as microelectrode array recordings and (cellular) imaging.
Deadline : 13 April 2025
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(03) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position on Transforming Streetscapes for Healthier Cities
While high-quality environments support good health, environmental stressors still contribute to an estimated 630,000 deaths annually in Europe. Traditional city-scale interventions such as air pollution and noise regulations fail to address the micro-scale variations in urban exposure that shape people’s daily health behaviors. Some local interventions, like creating parks, have shown benefits, yet large-scale implementation is often hindered by spatial constraints. What if we could harness the untapped potential of streetscapes to (re)design impactful, feasible, and widely accepted interventions that directly enhance public health?
In this PhD project, you will explore how street-level built and natural environmental changes influence people’s health and health behaviour. Using a novel combination of deep learning, street view imagery, and epidemiological methods, we aim to identify the most effective urban exposure modifications. This research will generate actionable insights to guide policymakers in designing healthier urban spaces.
Deadline : 15 May 2025
(04) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position on Unravelling the Social Exposome for Better Health
Environmental exposures, such as pollution and green space, are well-documented health determinants, but social environments remain largely overlooked in exposome research. However, social relationships profoundly impact health. Traditional methods for studying social environments, such as surveys, provide valuable insights but lack scalability; a significant limitation for exposome research involving millions of individuals. Emerging methods using population-scale microdata now allow us to construct large-scale models of social opportunity structures, offering a promising new avenue for understanding social determinants of health. However, their potential remains untapped in exposome research.
This PhD project aims to fill this gap by developing and validating scalable, data-driven social network models to revolutionise how we measure social exposures in health research. You will be at the forefront of an innovative and interdisciplinary research project exploring how person-level opportunity structures for social interactions can serve as proxies for social networks and how they impact health. Your work will contribute to a groundbreaking methodological framework for modeling social exposures on a massive scale.
Deadline :15 May 2025
(05) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position in Solid-state NMR and Drug Discovery (Antibiotics)
Using integrated structural biology, rooted in our key expertise solid-state NMR, we have recently made pioneering contributions to a better understanding of antibiotics that target bacterial membranes (e.g., Shukla et al.
Deadline :23 April 2025
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(06) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position on the Coupled Soil Carbon-Nitrogen-Phosphorus Cycles
Soils are the largest terrestrial reservoirs of carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P), playing a crucial role in global biogeochemical cycles. The soil cycles of C, N, and P interact dynamically with each other, but some of their individual pathways also differ. Spatial heterogeneity and temporal changes in climate, hydrological cycle, atmospheric chemical components, soil physiochemical properties, vegetations, and human activities (e.g., land-use change, agriculture, urbanization) collectively lead to changes in soil C-N-P cycling.
In this four-year study, you will develop a state-of-art global spatially explicit, integrated, mechanistic, coupled soil biogeochemistry model for the dynamic interconnected C-N-P cycling. This model will build on our pioneering model framework Integrated Model to Assess the Global Environment-Dynamic Global Nutrient Model (IMAGE-DGNM), which tracks the changes in climate, hydrological cycle, land cover, and human activities since the pre-industrial era. You will collect and synthesise the latest field and remote-sensing-based observation databases and reported coupled kinetics from labs and culture experiments, and use them to construct and validate the model. On this basis, we will quantify the spatiotemporal changes in global soil coupled C-N-P cycling from the pre-industrial era till the present and assess the influences of climate change and a variety of human activities. Questions regarding the interdependencies among C, N and P will be the research focus, such as how nutrient imbalance regulates/disrupts global soil C sequestration and how CO2 fertilisation influences N and P storage in soils and loss to waters and the atmosphere. We will further run the model to project their future changes under different scenarios. We invite you to share your ideas and suggestions for this innovative project in your application letter.
A personalised training programme will be set up, reflecting your training needs and career objectives. About 20% of your time will be dedicated to this training component, which includes following courses/workshops as well as training on the job in assisting in the Bachelor’s and Master’s programmes of the department at Utrecht University.
Deadline : 5 May 2025
(07) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD: climate feedbacks and methane cycling in arctic lakes
Both are consequential for the microbial community interactions that drive CH4 cycling but are poorly understood. In the PhD project we will investigate terrestrial vegetation dynamics and lake properties including the aeolian deposits in lake sediments over the last ~1000 years, where the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Climate Anomaly are known to have affected climate. For this, you will study the mineralogy and quantify lanthanides in sediments to assess chemical weathering and apply high resolution, automated palynology for vegetation dynamics. Downcore sedDNA analysis will in parallel unravel the important responses of the microbial community structure to climate driven DOM and sediments.
To support academic and personal development, PhD candidates follow courses and assist in teaching Earth Sciences at Bachelor’s and Master’s level. Together these activities amount to twenty percent of the contracted time.
Deadline : 2 May 2025
(08) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position: Living Decent Lives within Safe and Just Planetary Boundaries
The planetary boundaries framework defines limits to the impact of human activities on the Earth system. Recently, this framework has been combined with concepts of justice. In other words: identifying maximum exposure levels to environmental pressures to avoid excessive harm and ensuring minimum levels of welfare and resource access for all to secure decent living conditions.
In collaboration with other institutes within the Earth Commission, the IMAGE team at Utrecht University, and the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, we aim to develop scenarios that explore what is necessary to reach these two goals.
The work will expand the representation of planetary boundary indicators in the IMAGE model (such as ozone depletion, ocean acidification and water scarcity and chemicals) and the interaction between them. We will also work on new ways to describe the distribution of access to resources worldwide and collect relevant data (food, housing size, transport, clothing, appliances) and develop scenario tools that can look at various strategies to reach safe and just goals (e.g. technology and lifestyle change, redistribution and uplifting economic standards).
As a PhD candidate, you will be involved in this development, focusing specifically on distribution of current resource use and services (energy use, food consumption, water and greenhouse gas emissions).
Deadline : 20 April 2025
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(09) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD: The Psychological Consequences of Unequal Treatment in the Classroom
Inequality is on the rise globally. And this is visible in the classroom. Children from low socioeconomic status (SES) or immigration backgrounds underperform in school relative to their high-SES or non-immigrant peers, even when they are equally competent. As a PhD candidate in this project, you will study the psychological consequences of unequal treatment in the elementary school classroom.
Deadline :27 April 2025
(10) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD: Taking a Detour – How Flexibility Shapes Inequality in Higher Education
In many countries – including the Netherlands – children of highly educated parents are much more likely to also obtain a higher education degree. Most of this inequality does not originate in higher education, but in the trajectories leading towards it. Many students do not take the shortest route to higher education, but move from lower to higher tracks, or first finish vocational education. In this project you study to what extent such detours decrease or increase educational inequality and why that is the case. Can we understand this relationship by what happens at specific decision points in the educational career and characteristics of the educational system? The main focus of the study will be on the Netherlands. The project will use large-scale existing data and may include a small qualitative data collection.
Deadline :15 April 2025
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(11) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position on Abiotic Stress-Mediated Flowering
Plants go through various developmental phases, including flowering and fruit and seed production. Environmental factors influence these transitions. In this CropXR project, you will study how plants sense and respond to environmental stresses to adjust reproductive growth. Focusing on molecular networks regulating floral transition, you’ll identify key hubs controlling reproductive processes under temperature and drought stress. Findings will guide strategies to help plants thrive in changing climatic conditions.
Deadline : 16 April 2025
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(12) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position: Transition towards Circular Societies
The world is facing critical challenges, including climate change, biodiversity loss, excessive pollution, and resource scarcity. These systemic issues are rooted in the linear, extractive nature of resource use in present-day society. To address this, a transition to a circular society is urgently needed. But how can this transition be governed? What strategies can policymakers, businesses, and civil society use to accelerate this shift? And how can diverse actors be aligned around a shared vision of a circular future?
The exciting multi-disciplinary project ‘Accelerating the Circular Transition’ (ACT!). ACT! develops a systemic approach to accelerate the fair transition to a circular society in The Netherlands (and beyond). It will co-create a toolbox, including shared visions of a circular society (with societal wellbeing at the centre), simulation models, and an integrated approach to manage this complex transition. For this, the consortium exists of a large variety of scientific researchers (from different disciplinary backgrounds) in combination with stakeholders from all parts of the Dutch society, from (national, regional and local) government to industry, and local NGOs.
As a PhD candidate, you will focus on how mission-specific innovation systems (MIS) can drive circular transitions. Missions have become a new paradigm in innovation policy, aiming to align innovation processes with severe societal needs or problems marked by uncertainty, complexity and contestation. However, navigating these missions requires an understanding of the actors, institutions, and governance structures that shape them. To navigate this complexity, we will analyse the functioning of the MIS and focus on how governance structures can be coordinated to overcome contestation and fragmentation.
Deadline : 11 May 2025
(13) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD: Design of the Short-Term Electricity and Hydrogen Markets by 2050
The current market organisation of the Dutch energy system is not aligned with the ambition of climate neutrality by 2050. Current markets, policies, and regulations do not adequately address the need for investments, nor the demand for flexibility (crucial in integrating renewables), or the requirements coming from the integration of multiple energy carriers and small consumers. MODES’ overarching research goal is to propose a market design that can support an integrated, flexible energy system that meets public expectations in terms of reliability, affordability, and equity, during and after the energy transition. To this end, the project is organised around nine work packages (WPs) with corresponding PhD positions.
This PhD project focuses on the design of electricity and hydrogen markets, and aims at developing new market design that are both efficient and feasible from a societal perspective. To this end, the project includes the development of novel market design principles that facilitate technology-neutral scheduling of intermittent renewables, distributed resources, and multiple energy carriers. The identification of mathematical models and case studies to test the new market design(s) is an integral part of the thesis and will integrate with existing energy system modelling capabilities available at project partners. Finally, proposed reforms need to be analysed in light of societal feasibility and acceptance.
Deadline :15 April 2025
(14) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD: New Methods for Data Collection for Integrated Assessment Modelling
We are a team of researchers using integrated assessment modelling to explore global change problems. Integrated Assessment Models are used to support climate change decision making and describe the full chain of economic activities, associated energy and land use, greenhouse gas emissions, climate change and their impacts to explore possible response strategies. Data plays a key role in these models, ranging from the costs of different power plants to household size in different parts of the world. At the moment, there is no single database that includes all relevant data – and as a result, data from a wide range of – sometimes unstructured – sources is used. This data is also often inconsistent, e.g. data on car use, and car efficiency is not necessarily consistent with energy consumption by cars. Novel methods of data collection, including data scrapping and the use of AI, could possibly result in a much richer set of data – but also include algorithms that enhance the consistency of the data with associated levels of uncertainty.
Deadline :30 April 2025
(15) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position on Visioning a Circular Society
How can societies deal with the impacts of environmental damage? How to access the resources needed for society and economy? And, more urgently, how can societies limit their impact on the wider planet? One widely agreed-upon necessity is the transition to a circular society, a society that is not extractive but that systematically re-uses its resources. In this PhD, you will contribute to visions of a circular future.
Our multi-disciplinary project ‘Accelerating the Circular Transition’ (ACT!) develops a systemic approach to accelerate the fair transition to a circular society in The Netherlands (and beyond). It will co-create an integrated approach to manage this complex transition, building a toolbox of shared visions of a circular society with societal wellbeing at the centre. For this, the consortium exists of a large variety of scientific researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds, as well as stakeholders from all parts of Dutch society, including (national, regional and local) government, industry, and local NGO’s.
Deadline : 15 April 2025
(16) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position in DSLs for High-Performance Computing
We are looking for junior researchers who want to jump-start their careers as PhD candidates in Differential and Probabilistic Programming as a part of the ERC project FoRECAST. In this project, you work both independently and in collaboration with a diverse team. You will conduct research on the aspects of FORECAST relating to DSLs for High-Performance Computing. This is a unique opportunity to contribute to the foundations for tomorrow’s machine learning.
Deadline :21 April 2025
(17) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position in Microbial Drivers of Peat Oxidation
Are you passionate about environmental science and eager to contribute to climate solutions? Utrecht University is looking for a PhD candidate to investigate the role of microbial communities in peat oxidation. Join us in uncovering key processes driving greenhouse gas emissions from Dutch peatlands and help develop strategies for sustainable land management.
Deadline : 9 April 2025
(18) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position in Probabilistic and Differential Algorithms
We are looking for junior researchers who want to jump-start their careers as PhD candidates in Differential and Probabilistic Programming as a part of the ERC project FoRECAST. In this project, you work both independently and in collaboration with a diverse team. You will conduct research on the aspects of FORECAST relating to Probabilistic and Differential Algorithms. This is a unique opportunity to contribute to the foundations for tomorrow’s machine learning.
Deadline : 21 April 2025
(19) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position in Programming Semantics and Category Theory
We are looking for junior researchers who want to jump-start their careers as PhD candidates in Differential and Probabilistic Programming as a part of the ERC project FoRECAST. In this project, you work both independently and in collaboration with a diverse team. You will conduct research on the aspects of FORECAST relating to Programming Language Semantics. This is a unique opportunity to contribute to the foundations for tomorrow’s machine learning.
Deadline :21 April 2025
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(20) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD in Iranian Secular Visual Culture
This PhD position is part of the NWO VIDI-funded project “Iran’s Secular Shift”, which investigates Iran’s evolving secular landscape using a mixed-methods approach. This subproject specifically focuses on visual culture and digital media to explore representations of non-religion, atheism, and calls for separating mosque and state in Iran. The research contributes to a broader understanding of how secularity is articulated in an authoritarian, theocratic context.
Deadline : 20 April 2025
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).
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