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: impacts of human-induced air-water pollution on planetary health
Air and water are fundamental components of the Earth system and the planet’s primary life-support media. Since pre-industrial times, human-induced air and water pollution has become one of the most pervasive anthropogenic pressures. Nitrogen emissions from agriculture, fossil-fuel combustion, wastewater discharge, etc., modified by hydrological alteration and climate change, propagate through tightly coupled air-water-climate systems, affecting ecosystems and humans across regions and generations.
In this four-year study, you will quantify and map how human-driven nitrogen pollution from farming, fossil fuels, and wastewater moves and transforms through air and water and affects both ecosystem and human health worldwide using the global spatially explicit, integrated biogeochemistry model IMAGE-DGNM. You will couple the state-of-the-art biogeochemical model with health and ecological evidence to identify where and why health risks are highest, and how those risks have changed since the 1850s and may evolve to 2100 under different scenarios. Crucially, you will translate impacts into interpretable, comparable numbers, such as populations affected, biodiversity loss, and economic costs, so they can be weighed against the benefits of development. Finally, you will test future solutions under different climate and pollution-control pathways to help design region-specific, cost-effective policies for a healthier planet. We invite you to share your ideas and suggestions for this innovative project in your motivation letter.
Deadline : 1 July 2026
(02) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD candidate in infectious disease phylodynamics
Your PhD project will be part of the PRIDE project and will focus on the virulence and transmission dynamics of PRRSv. Effective control of PRRSv requires insight into how the virus spreads between pig farms in the Netherlands. In addition, understanding which viral lineages are most virulent, and why, is essential for the development of targeted control measures. Finally, farmers need clear guidance on the biosecurity measures required to control the virus within farms.
To address these questions, you will work with genetic sequence data from PRRSv strains detected through the national PRRS surveillance programme, combined with relevant farm-level metadata, including geographic information and antibiotic use data. You will apply innovative phylodynamic and epidemiological methods to investigate your research questions.
Deadline : 14 June 2026
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(03) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD: does an island’s geologic history predict its ecosystem resilience today?
The department of Earth Sciences is seeking an enthusiastic candidate for a PhD project focussing on ecosystem health and resilience on islands, in context of geological and paleoenvironmental changes over millions of years.
Ecosystems are threatened by anthropogenic climate change and habitat loss. Within this context, ecosystem health is largely determined by ecosystem resilience: the capacity of a system to manage disturbance by resisting change, recovering from change, or adapting and benefiting as a result of change. Observational data cover only the first two aspects of resilience: resistance and recovery, as they act on ecological timescales. Adaptation, however, happens on evolutionary timescales, and its importance therefore remains unknown.
The aim of this PhD project is to study ecosystem resilience resulting from adaptation to disturbances on geological and evolutionary timescales. We focus on islands: ideal natural laboratories serving as isolated model systems of the natural world. We hypothesize that the intensity and frequency of paleoenvironmental changes is a predictor of ecosystem resilience to human-induced environmental change. We will determine whether islands with intermediate dynamic geological histories have produced ecosystems accustomed to environmental change, thus making them more resilient to disturbances today. Islands with geological histories characterized by long-term stability, or instead, with disturbances that are too severe, are expected to harbour more vulnerable ecosystems.
Deadline : 15 June 2026
(04) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD in Parenting and caregiving in contaminated water landscapes
This project explores parents’ everyday experiences and future visions of raising children in an environment impacted by PFAS contamination of soils and groundwater. PFAS contamination in the environment is often studied in disciplinary siloes: it is understood from either a natural sciences or social science perspective. As a result, previous research has overlooked how PFAS function simultaneously physically and socially as well as how they leave physical and social long-term traces in parents’ lives and environments.
Current scholarship in human geography centers on toxic geographies, in which scholars have argued that the gradual exposure that residents endure is a form of structural and slow violence. They posit that toxic living environments are not necessarily invisible, but that powerful actors do not recognise the experiences of the residents who inhabit toxic spaces, especially those who are most vulnerable, such as children. In contrast, quantitative research on PFAS-contaminated areas generally focuses on mapping the status quo by measuring PFAS concentrations in soil and groundwater and comparing them to current limit values. There is little attention for the legacy effects of PFAS contamination, even though these determine the safety of drinking water resources in future and thus the precautions needed to provide and consume drinking water with safe PFAS levels in the long-term.
This PhD project will empirically connect these bodies of literature by showing how a planetary health issue (PFAS as a ‘forever chemical’ circulating through water systems and bodies) is lived and negotiated in specific households and places. We will apply a planetary health lens to disentangle the links between human and non-human interactions in polluted environments. The PhD candidate will innovatively combine qualitative social science methods with soil and water measurements and PFAS modelling, with the aim of understanding parents’ experiences and future visions, support them in dealing with PFAS water contamination, and stimulate exchange between authorities, affected communities and the general public on the topic.
Deadline : 10 June 2026
(05) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD on Industrial Wastewater Permits for Sustainable Water Quality
With climate change, rising demand, and pollution threatening water supplies, the BlueVantage project brings the water sector together to develop technical and governance solutions, thereby ensuring a clean water cycle for industry, ecology, and society. By working closely with water companies, innovations are tested in real-life situations.
At present, large challenges exist in meeting the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) water quality goals due to high pollutant emissions. Industrial emissions are authorized by the water manager, but water treatment at the plant is often not optimized for removal of chemical pollutants. This can lead to serious emissions of chemical pollutants to surface water and indirectly to groundwater, thus standing in the way of meeting the WFD targets and causing problems for water re-use.
In this PhD project we aim to determine and predict the influence of industrial discharge permits on the water quality in the Netherlands. In addition, we will test the efficiency of nature-based treatment solutions in the urban context for industrial wastewater treatment. By better understanding the relationship between industrial discharge permits and (urban) water quality, this project aims to contribute to the development of guidance for the permitting authorities for including (nature-based) treatment in the permitting process.
Deadline : 21 June 2026
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(06) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD in Relational Monitoring for Liveable Futures
Monitoring is one of the core functions of knowledge infrastructures, which are combinations of technologies, practices, actors and institutions. As currently implemented, monitoring mainly supports the distanced and disciplined surveillance of phenomena and emphasises repeated series of measurements to convey trends. While this approach provides objective, comparable and computable insights, it produces knowledge that aims to observe and describe, and that by definition, is separate from action and engagement.
This approach has been widely critiqued and powerful proposals have been put forth that connect knowing and acting (transformative change, contaminating encounters, situated knowledge, radical interdependence, combining accountability and learning (Tsing, Haraway, Escobar, Garzon-Lopez, Regeer, etc). These proposal constitute an important starting point for this project that explores a paradigm in which monitoring supports iteration, intervention and transformation. It stimulates deep learning and ‘frame-reflexivity’, rather than thin learning for optimization (Chambers et al). Such an approach requires on-going and inclusive dialogue among knowledge holders and awareness of how infrastructures embed knowledge in socio-material relations.
Deadline : 7 May 2026
(07) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD position in Geosciences students’ professional identity development
‘Who do I want to become’ is a question young people often struggle with at the start of their student career. Many students of geography are uncertain about their future career, which can affect their study success and future transition to work. Utrecht University invites applications for a PhD research position investigating Geoscience students’ sense of their future professional selves and how the faculty of Geosciences’ educational programs can help strengthen students’ professional identity development.
Unlike medicine or law, a geography degree does not lead to a clearly delineated profession; rather ‘geography is what geographers do’ as is sometimes said. However, this is not helpful for students in the process of developing professional identity. Despite the crucial role geographers and earth scientists play in addressing sustainability challenges, the field’s broad career spectrum and limited visibility of job opportunities within degree programmes often generates uncertainty among prospective students and an unclear sense of their professional trajectory. While a focus on students’ professional identity development is common in law, engineering and medicine, recent research suggests students in social science and humanities programs might also profit from educational activities that develop their professional identity. Our students and alumni indicate that the same could also be true for geosciences education. We want to know how geography students’ professional identity develops during the course of their study, understand how it affects their motivation and self-efficacy and learn which educational activities could strengthen their professional identity development.
The PhD project thereby contributes to our educational ambition in the faculty of Geosciences to enhance students’ development. The PhD candidate will therefore have direct impact with their scientific practice and results by identifying and enhancing emergent educational practices, while collaborating with teams to support their enactment. We also seek to create societal impact by strengthening collaborations between students, alumni, professional societies (KNAG) and the wider public.
Deadline : 7 June 2026
(08) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD position in Mechano-catalytic conversion of plastic waste
Use your experience with catalysis, polymer science, and/or mechano-chemistry to develop new recycling technologies for plastics using mechano-catalytic milling. You will enter a relatively unexplored field of chemistry together with an expanding team of PhD students and Postdocs. You will also spend a few months with our collaborators at the Fraunhofer Institute WKI in Germany and the WAB company in Switzerland.
This project aims to pioneer the conversion of photo-curing resins, such as breaking crosslinks to enable solubility and recycling. By unravelling the intricate interplay between mechanical forces, catalysis, and selective polymer chain cleavage, you will gain valuable insights into the fundamental mechanisms shaping the future of recycling technology. You will develop operando spectroscopic techniques to track the bond cleavage during ball milling. Embrace the array of cutting-edge spectroscopic and analytic techniques (e.g., EPR, SEC, Raman, IR, and TGA) within the Institute of Sustainable and Circular Chemistry (ISCC), and become a trailblazer in mechano-catalytic polymer recycling.
Deadline : 2 June 2026
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(09) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position in Analytical Chemistry
You will work in an analytical laboratory equipped with advanced instrumentation, including (2D-)LC, CE, and several ion mobility-mass spectrometry (IM-MS) platforms. The project aims to achieve reliable structural identification and quantification of glycans and glycopeptides in complex biological samples, including cell surfaces and tissue sections, using high-resolution (HR) IM-MS techniques. For instance, you will investigate MS fragmentation methods and utilize various glycan labeling strategies to examine their gas-phase conformations. Furthermore, you will develop calibration techniques to accurately determine collision cross-sections (CCS) for HR IM-MS platforms.
Deadline : 27 May 2026
(10) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Position in Human Data Interaction for Health and Wellbeing
Digital technologies, such as wearables and mobile applications, allow individuals to continuously track personal data related to health and wellbeing. These systems capture a wide range of metrics, including steps taken, stress levels, heart rate, and sleep quality. Metrics are not neutral entities: they shape self-perception, evoke emotion, and can reinforce social norms, often surfacing sensitivities, taboos, and stigma. As a result, people’s experiences with their data are shaped not only by usability, but by how these metrics are interpreted, felt, and situated within everyday life; often involving processes of reflection and, at times, rumination.
In this PhD project, you will investigate the lived and affective experience of personal data in context. The focus is on how individuals interpret and engage with their metrics over time, particularly when these data become emotionally charged or socially sensitive. You will examine how such experiences influence ongoing interaction, including responses such as reflection, discomfort, reassurance, or resistance.
The project takes a human-centred and interpretive perspective, drawing on concepts from human-computer interaction, sociology, and psychology. It focuses on meaning-making and subjective experience, contributing to research in human-data interaction and personal informatics by examining how data is experienced, negotiated, and sometimes avoided in everyday contexts.
Deadline : 15 June 2026
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(11) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD position on Fine Particles in Shallow Groundwater Systems
Society increasingly relies on groundwater pumping for seasonal energy storage, geothermal energy, drinking water production, urban development, and climate change mitigation. To pump and infiltrate groundwater, the placement of a well and positioning within the local stratigraphical sequence are essential to ensure capacity and longevity. In Utrecht, the uppermost aquifer is extensively used for Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage (ATES) systems that store seasonal thermal energy for building heating and cooling. Wells are placed in aquifers composed of coarse Middle Pleistocene sediments. Unfortunately, filters in these wells are highly susceptible to particle clogging, in many cases requiring far more intervention than originally anticipated.
Once clogged by fine particles, wells require regeneration (unclogging) to restore pumping capacity. At present, there is no reliable method to predict when and where and how frequent wells will clog, nor is there a comprehensive analysis of which facies and filter combinations perform well and which require ongoing maintenance. Therefore, this collaborative project combines expertise in Quaternary Geology in the Department of Physical Geography (Dr Kim Cohen) with expertise in subsurface utilization and in modelling particle dynamics in the Department of Earth Sciences (Dr Thomas Sweijen).
Deadline : 21 June 2026
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(12) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD position: Improving immunity in neonatal piglets
This project combines fundamental and applied research to strengthen the immune competence of suckling piglets, focusing on two main pillars:
- optimising colostrum quality through maternal (sow) nutrition;
- evaluating early-life vaccination strategies.
As a PhD candidate, you will design and execute research involving both laboratory work and animal studies. Your work will include developing assays to characterize colostrum and milk composition, performing immunological assays, implementing nutritional and vaccination interventions, and conducting advanced data analysis.
Deadline : 27 May 2026
(13) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD in Global Talent Interdependence and Europe’s Strategic Innovation Ambitions
Talent is a critical yet scarce resource in contemporary innovation systems. Across Europe, concerns about competitiveness, resilience, and technological sovereignty have renewed attention to the role of highly skilled human capital. At the same time, geopolitical tensions, migration restrictions, and national security considerations may constrain the international mobility of researchers, potentially reshaping global knowledge networks and innovation outcomes.
This PhD project examines how Europe’s strategic innovation ambitions depend on the mobility of global talent, with a particular focus on STEM PhD recipients as key actors in science- and technology-based innovation. The project bridges economic geography and innovation studies to understand how doctoral training, international mobility, and institutional contexts shape where knowledge is created and where it is ultimately translated into technological and economic value.
The project combines large-scale longitudinal data on PhD recipients with complementary sources such as publication and patent data, and aims to enrich these with other sources on individual paths and preferences. The PhD candidate will have the opportunity to develop unique datasets and apply quantitative and mixed-method approaches to address policy-relevant questions at the intersection of innovation, migration, and geography.
Deadline : 25 May 2026
(14) PhD Degree – Fully Funded
PhD position summary/title: PhD Mediated Sciences: how social media impacts climate communication practice.
Do you want to do field research on how social media platforms influence climate science communication in practice? In this PhD project, you will study the experiences, routine practices, and ideas of science communicators who use social media platforms such as X and LinkedIn to communicate academic knowledge about climate and sustainability. The project will investigate this by looking at concrete case studies within the Dutch context (within sites of commercial, academic, journalistic science communication/public engagement). The purpose is to understand how platform features like engagement analytics (e.g. views, likes) or perceptions of the affordances of interfaces become embedded within these communicators’ norms of content creation. How do practitioners seek to uphold science’s public credibility in their work as they participate in attention economies that have been shown to incentivize disinformation? These questions are all the more urgent and societally relevant today, because the rise of social media platforms has multiplied science communication actors and is challenging the dominance of traditional science communicators. This PhD research project will be situated within the team-project (Vidi), Mediated Science: Expanding How We Study Social Media’s Influence on Climate Disinformation led by Donya Alinejad at Utrecht University’s Department of Media and Culture Studies.
Deadline : 21 May 2026
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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