Postdoctoral Fellowship (10) at Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands

Predictive models are central to Industry 4.0, yet their performance deteriorates over time due to sensor drift, process variations, and system changes. The CareFree Models Project addresses these challenges by developing frameworks for automated maintenance, adaptation, and transfer of predictive models, ensuring robust, sustainable, and efficient industrial operations.

The successful candidate will lead the Model Predictive Control (MPC) development for a drying process, one of the project’s key industrial case studies. Responsibilities include:

• Developing and implementing scalable MPC strategies for dryer systems.
• Developing and integrating self-updating and adaptive predictive models into industrial operations.
• Collaborating with academic and industrial partners for validation on real-world data.
• Contributing to a transferable and scalable Industry 4.0 framework. 

In the BUILTWISE – Automated Construction for Affordable Housing Development project, we are developing a digitally driven, factory-based approach to modular housing. To ensure our innovation aligns with the realities of the built environment, we are looking for a part-time professional with direct experience in designing and delivering buildings—from concept to construction. You will play a key role in translating modular design logic into real-world building applications, integrating structural, mechanical, and legislative perspectives. Your contribution will help ensure that our parametric systems and design workflows remain grounded in construction logic, code compliance, and system coordination across HVAC, water, electrical, and safety domains. This position is ideal for someone who wants to work in an academic–industry hybrid environment, guiding digital innovation with practical experience. BUILTWISE is an ongoing project with an established team and user committee. You will join this group to help strengthen our efforts and deliver a practical industry demonstrator.

At Eindhoven University of Technology, you’ll be part of our innovative 3DCP group, driving change in the Built Environment. Collaborate with our team to overcome challenges to produce affordable buildings using automated construction. Your work will address critical issues in the construction industry and contribute to developing cost-effective housing, positively impacting society and promoting sustainability.

As a postdoctoral researcher, you will work in an interdisciplinary team to develop immersive co-design environments that connect citizen experience, simulation data, and fairness evaluation. You will:

• Design and test VR environments that represent alternative configurations of urban space (e.g. street reallocation, mobility hubs, or green corridors).
• Identify and integrate relevant data streams from cognitive digital twins, ensuring that scenarios include measurable indicators for social fairness assessment.
• Organize and facilitate participatory workshops where citizens and decision-makers experience and evaluate different urban scenarios in VR.
• Collect and process data from these sessions, combining objective indicators (e.g., space use, accessibility, emissions) with subjective responses (e.g., behavioural, emotional, cognitive).
• Analyse and model the data to explain patterns of preference, acceptance, and perceived fairness across diverse city contexts.
• Feed insights and modelling results back into the digital twin environment to refine and validate future scenarios.
• Produce scholarly and practice oriented outputs including journal publications and policy briefs.
• Contribute to planning, documentation, monitoring, ethics/data management, and reporting to funding bodies.

As a postdoc in our group, you will be responsible for setting up new compact models. Compact models are the optimum trade-off between the required physical functionality and computation intensity. As such, they enable the simulation of advanced and high-integration-density photonic integrated circuits. (PICs). Specifically, we will be looking at optical amplifiers, lasers and photodetectors, with a focus on noise and high-power behavior. Such compact models will propel the field of PICs into applications beyond communications, e.g., in fiber sensing, metrology and microwave photonics.

Since such models need to be qualified for PIC foundry platforms, you will also be responsible for setting up and evaluating new optical test and characterization techniques. The goal is to be able to measure all the parameters in the compact model in a wafer-scale approach and in a robust way. You will first work in our optical characterization lab, but then transfer these techniques to automated wafer testing tools.

So, where is the scientific challenge in all this? The field of PICs is rapidly evolving, along similar lines as electronics did a few decades ago. We are entering a new era, that is currently not well explored, and we need you to set the new standards of working, and to develop new design concepts. It’s an open field, with lots of opportunities for a creative researcher, who can keep an eye on the bigger picture.

EcoCARE – Ecologies of Care: Multispecies Design and Circular Community Economies in Peri‑Urban Settings is a DUT (Driving Urban Transitions) Partnership project engaging a cross-European consortium with partners in France, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Sweden and the Netherlnds. It addresses biodiversity loss, fragmented urban planning, and climate risks by advancing more‑than‑human approaches to urban design and circular community economies. Across a network of living labs in post‑industrial, suburban, and peri‑urban neighbourhoods in five countries, EcoCARE combines commons‑based ecological stewardship, multispecies design, and transformative pedagogies to diversify local biotopes, enhance socio‑ecological resilience, and build capacity through communities of practice. This post‑doc will anchor the nature stewardship strand of EcoCARE, focusing on citizen‑driven models for maintaining biodiverse public spaces and multi‑species placemaking in residential urban areas. 

Embedded in the Urbanism and Urban Architecture research group and our practice oriented studio environment ‘Urban Labs’ you will conduct cutting‑edge research and co‑produce practice with residents and practitioners to design, test, and evaluate models for citizen‑led biodiversity maintenance in residential urban contexts (e.g., pocket parks, green streets, wetlands/rewilded areas, shared courtyards). The post‑doc bridges research, pedagogy, and practice, contributing to the project’s scientific outputs, living lab programming, and the communities of practice.

The Dutch-German InSynQ project aims to make integrated photonics ready for applications in quantum sensing and metrology. We will do this with a focus on indium phosphide (InP) based monolithic technology, operating around 1550 nm, i.e., the telecom wavelengths. The goal is to invent and develop novel low-noise and ultra-stable tunable lasers and very sensitive photodetectors. These will be integrated onto a photonic integrated circuit (PIC), so the quantum sensing systems can be miniaturized. Together with our German industry partner Menlo Systems, we will then make the technology ready to go into compact quantum clocks. Quantum everywhere, with PICs inside!

As a postdoc in our group, you will be responsible for realizing such novel PICs, with a focus on advanced wavelength-tunable lasers and their stabilization. The work includes the design of novel lasers, typically making use of a mature (external) foundry platform, such as offered by our JePPIX partners (https://www.jeppix.eu/). You will also be working with a PhD student, who will be developing new extremely sensitive photodiodes, beyond the current capabilities of commercial foundries. These chips will finally be tested in our optical characterization labs. You are expected to coordinate the work and establish a helicopter view of the InP PIC technology capabilities and ecosystem (e.g., http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0268-1242/29/8/083001).

The work in our group will be highly collaborative and complementary to the work done by our Partner in this project, Menlo Systems. The work at TU/e will focus on the PIC design and technology development. Since Eindhoven is located in the heart of the leading semiconductor and photonics ecosystem “Brainport” (https://brainporteindhoven.com/en/), close collaboration with a wider range of academic and industrial partners can also be anticipated.

In this position you will leverage materials with high thermal conductivities (e.g. 2D materials) to achieve efficient cooling of the photo-excited nanoparticles. You will prepare the material samples, and quantify thermal conduction processes using optical techniques like nanothermometry and ultrafast spectroscopy. You will develop numerical models for nanoscale heat dissipation to interpret the experimental data.

The project will be supervised by Prof. Zijlstra (Molecular Plasmonics group) and co-supervised by Prof. Klaas-Jan Tielrooij (Ultrafast Dynamics group). You will closely collaborate with students and postdocs in both group.

Grand societal challenges require a shift in the rationale of engineering curricula from focusing on engineering challenges to addressing grand societal challenges. This shift involves moving from solely teaching disciplinary knowledge towards fostering transformative competencies, both disciplinary and transdisciplinary. However, there is a lack of knowledge on co-creating constructively aligned engineering curricula that balance and support the development of transformative competencies within the new rationale. TU/e received a NRO research grant for the future of higher education to study how to co-create content-wise open, yet time-bound engineering curricula that are constructively aligned, and balance and support the development of transformative competencies within the new rationale of addressing societal challenges.

This project will contribute to a change in rationale for engineering curricula from a focus on solving engineering challenges to addressing societal challenges. The project will deliver validated design principles and solutions for practice for co-creating content-wise open, yet time-bound constructively aligned engineering curricula within the new rationale. Since transformation of educational institutes is restricted by current systems and mentalities, we have chosen the time-bound scope to have realistic impact at the end of the project. Our research will deliver foundation for changing one or more engineering curricula within five years. To achieve this, two interlinked sub-projects are devised, conducted by one PhD candidate, and one Post doc.

As a PhD candidate and postdoctoral researcher, you will conduct educational design research, i.e. a development study aimed at designing evidence-based solutions for complex problems in educational practice. This approach allows for systemic analysis of the problem, iterative (re)design and evaluation of practice-oriented solutions, and the advancement of knowledge.

At Eindhoven University of Technology, you’ll be part of our innovative 3DCP group, driving change in the Built Environment. Collaborate with our team to overcome challenges to produce affordable buildings using automated construction. Your work will address critical issues in the construction industry and contribute to developing cost-effective housing, positively impacting society and promoting sustainability.

In this role, you will:

1. Parametric Design and Plugin Development: Develop custom plugins and computational workflows (e.g., Grasshopper for Rhino) to generate modular housing layouts. Support full design-to-fabrication pipelines that integrate reinforcement, MEP, and layout logic.
2. System Integration and Digital Toolchains: Implement rules-based design systems that account for structural, regulatory, and production constraints. Ensure seamless data flow across platforms, linking design logic to fabrication and BIM environments.
3. Prototyping and Validation: Integrate your digital tools into physical prototyping workflows. Collaborate on pilot-scale builds and prepare interfaces and documentation for use in demonstrator modules.