Postdoctoral Fellowship (22) at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), Netherlands

We are seeking a highly motivated Postdoctoral Researcher to join the European UrbanAIR project, an interdisciplinary initiative that aims to support healthier and more sustainable cities by integrating environmental modelling, decision analysis, and behavioural simulation within a digital twin infrastructure.

UrbanAIR develops innovative methods to assess how policy interventions influence urban mobility patterns, air pollution exposure, and population vulnerability.

The postdoctoral researcher will play a central role in connecting behavioural decision-making with environmental exposure assessment through the development of an Agent-Based Model (ABM) of mobility behaviour in Barcelona.

Research Responsibilities

The successful candidate will lead the development of a behavioural model that simulates how individuals make mobility decisions in urban environments and how these decisions evolve in response to policy interventions.

Key responsibilities include:

• Designing and implementing a mobility-focused Agent-Based Model for selected neighbourhoods in Barcelona.
• Developing and conducting a discrete choice experiment (or related choice modelling approach) to identify behavioural preferences and mobility decision-making processes.
• Simulating the effects of policy interventions such as public transport incentives, active mobility measures, pricing schemes, or other behavioural interventions developed in collaboration with decision analysis experts.
• Collaborating closely with environmental modelling partners to translate simulated mobility patterns into estimates of population exposure and vulnerability.

We are looking for a candidate who will investigate the regional geology of the Saharan Platform. This will build on top of the ~100 publications and PhD theses from the North Africa Research Group, to generate new ideas and regional maps of past vertical movements (uplift and subsidence), as well as source-to-sink maps. The candidate will focus on the Paleozoic unconformities, examining their nature and quantifying potential vertical movements hidden within them. Specifically, the candidate will sample material below and above the Taconic unconformity, related to the Hirnantian glaciation that was covering Africa/Gondwana during the Ordovician. The success of the project relies on existing datasets as well as new ones to be acquired, especially for Low-Temperature Thermochronology, for which new field missions for sample collection are to be planned (samples may also be aquiered from museum/private collections). The project aims to deliver a series of regional source-to-sink maps for the Paleozoic Epochs, and to test them using Landscape Evolution Modelling. 

Delft University of Technology invites applications for a Postdoctoral Researcher to join the ALD4TANDEM project, an ambitious research programme developing advanced atomic layer deposition (ALD) technologies for next-generation perovskite-silicon tandem solar cells.

The position is embedded in the Photovoltaic Materials and Devices (PVMD) group, in close cooperation with TU Delft colleagues and industrial partners. You will work in a multidisciplinary environment, providing a unique opportunity to combine fundamental research with industrial technology development.

We offer an inspiring research setting at one of Europe’s leading technical universities, with access to unique deposition and test facilities and strong international collaboration networks. This position provides the opportunity to contribute directly to the energy transition and to the development of sustainable, scalable heating solutions for the built environment.

The research in the Department of Electrical Sustainable Energy is inspired by the technical, scientific, and societal challenges originating from the transition towards a more sustainable society and focuses on four areas:

• DC Systems, Energy Conversion and Storage (DCE&S) 
• Photovoltaic Materials and Devices (PVMD)
• Intelligent Electrical Power Grids (IEPG)
• High Voltage Technologies (HVT)

‘Cultivated meat’, the production of genuine meat products from in vitro culture of animal cells, is an emerging biotechnology within the field of cellular agriculture with the potential to revolutionise food production from both an environmental and ethical perspective. Unfortunately, higher eukaryotic cells in their unmodified state have severe limitations with respect to in vitro culture, presenting major challenges for the scalability and cost-effectiveness of cultivated meat bioprocesses. These include limited cellular lifespans, slow proliferation rates, demanding medium requirements and a preference for adherent growth, amongst others.

Cell engineering can solve these problems! We are hiring for multiple postdoctoral scientists to join the group for fully-funded projects of (an initial) 2 years. Within the Flack group, you will engineer and evolve bovine satellite cell lines with a variety of new and improved phenotypes, relating to (for example) suspension culture, signalling pathway activation and cellular lifespan. Once new cell lines have been engineered, you will characterise them using a wide variety of methods, including flow cytometry, microscopy and transcriptomics.

Within the scope of cell engineering for cultivated meat, there will be freedom to select and suggest your own research projects, and to become acquainted with new techniques and approaches. There will be ample opportunities to supervise PhD, MSc and BSc students in the group, and to become familiar with grant writing and funding acquisition. Careers advice and discussion will be available for both academic and industry-minded scientists. We are a friendly, collaborative group and are looking for highly motivated candidates with strong project management and communication skills. You will be joining a dynamic department with broad interests in biotechnology and synthetic biology across all domains of life.

We are looking for a highly motivated Postdoctoral Researcher to contribute to the development and implementation of the ROUTES’ monitoring and design evaluation framework, its comparative data analysis, and the ROUTES Atlas co-development. You will help design standardized metrics, indicators, and data collection protocols to assess the short-, medium-, and long-term effects of joint schoolyard-street transformations on community well-being, accessibility, safety, and social cohesion, and translate multi-site data into comparative insights and practical tools for cities and practitioners.

Recent advances in the field have demonstrated that heterogeneity and hydro-mechanical processes strongly control gas transport in low-permeability clays, and that gas migration may involve the development of localised pathways. While high-fidelity models that explicitly represent such processes provide valuable insight into the underlying physics, they also highlight two key challenges.

First, hydro-mechanical coupling is not yet fully integrated within stochastic modelling frameworks, limiting our ability to assess the combined effects of material variability and mechanical behaviour. Second, models that explicitly represent localised features are computationally too expensive for large-scale and long-term simulations, such as those required for repository performance assessment.

The central objective of this project is therefore to develop an efficient stochastic hydro-mechanical modelling framework for gas migration in clays, capable of bridging detailed process understanding and large-scale applications. Key research directions include:

• Developing physics-based upscaled models informed by high-fidelity simulations of gas migration processes
• Exploring the use of deep learning techniques to generate realistic heterogeneous material representations and to support stochastic hydro-mechanical simulations
• Extending existing modelling approaches to include hydro-mechanical coupling in heterogeneous materials
• Incorporating uncertainty quantification (UQ) to assess the impact of spatial variability and uncertainty in material parameters on gas migration.

We seek a highly motivated postdoctoral researcher to develop and apply integrated workflows for in situ cryogenic electron tomography (cryo-ET). The project will focus on automating cellular targeting and lamella preparation of frozen-hydrated biological specimen on a unique instrument, with the aim of enabling efficient and reproducible structural analysis of molecular complexes in their native cellular environment.

The candidate will establish streamlined and AI-facilitated approaches for identifying regions of interest, guiding site-specific lamella preparation, and acquiring high-quality cryo-ET data. The candidate will apply these workflows to challenging questions in the structural cell biology of the assembly of a unique machinery involed in bacterial motility and cell-autonomous immunity. Working at the intersection of technical development and biological applications, the candidate will also contribute to the development of computational methods for the contextual interpretation of cellular tomograms. The position involves close interaction with other experimentalists and computational researchers who together work towards methodological advances that facilitate biological discovery.

Your home base will be the Jakobi Lab (https://cryoem.tudelft.nl) at TU Delft | Kavli Institute of Nanoscience. We are a multidisciplinary, international and diverse team of scientists with backgrounds ranging from (bio)chemistry and physics to bioinformatics and cell biology. Our drive is to push boundaries in our aim to visualise molecular processes in their native context and at the highest possible resolution. As part of the Department of Bionanoscience and the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, we enjoy access to state-of-the-art infrastructure for biochemistry, molecular imaging, cryoEM/ET and high-performance computing. We are also committed to world-class education, and you will have the opportunity to contribute by mentoring undergraduate and graduate students. We foster a friendly, collaborative, and non-hierarchical environment where ideas and expertise are openly shared in pursuit of ambitious scientific goals. You will receive strong support and training to further your personal and professional development.

Automated Vehicles (AVs) are set to transform road travel, promising significant improvements in road safety, accessibility, and transportation equity. However, as autonomous vehicles move closer to widespread deployment a critical question remains largely unanswered: how can AVs interact safely and effectively with vulnerable road users (VRUs), including people with disabilities?  Such interactions involve complex human decision-making processes that span behavioral, cognitive, psychological, and physiological dimensions. To date, these dimensions have largely been studied in isolation, leaving their interconnections and their role in real-world AV–VRU interactions poorly understood.

In this Postdoc position you will focus on employing Virtual Reality technologies to better understand this complex interaction process and explore how external Human-Machine Interfaces (eHMIs) can enable safer and more inclusive interactions. You will:

• Develop a theoretical framework for identifying key characteristics of AV–VRU interactions and define design criteria for inclusive eHMIs.
• Develop accessible VR simulators for people with disabilities.
• Conduct VR experiments to collect data and model decision-making processes in AV–VRU interactions.
• Conduct real-world testing to evaluate the effectiveness of inclusive eHMI design.
• Collaborate with fellow researchers, mentor PhD students, and contribute to ongoing projects and the development of the lab.
• Publish in high-impact scientific journals and disseminating findings through conferences and stakeholder workshops.

Energy storage is an indispensable factor for bridging the electricity consumption with the intermittent renewable energy supply. With increasing supply of renewable electricity in our energy mix, and electrification across industrial, transport, commercial, and residential sectors strains existing grid infrastructure, electricity storage is required to prevent congestion and transmission bottlenecks. This energy storage is required at a broad range of timescales. While technology is available for the short to medium timescales, very little technology is available to store electricity efficiently to cover durations of 25+ hours.

In that light, we started the collaborative research project REDOX BLEND, performed at seven Dutch universities and knowledge institutes (TU Delft, RUG, UTwente, TU/Eindhoven, U Nijmegen, DIFFER, TNO) to develop next generation batteries for ultra-long-duration energy storage. Specifically, this postdoc position focuses on redox mediated solutions to increase the energy density of flow batteries. You will study complexes with transition metals, such as iron-based complexes, and inorganic prussian blue analogue materials. You will also study coatings and additives to secure stable particles of these redox active materials.

We’re looking for a postdoc with a background in electrochemistry, with an excellent performance for his/her career stage. The candidate should have good skills to collaborate in an interdisciplinary project, for leveraging joint research with other universities in the project and with industrial partners (Aquabattery, Elestor, Ore Energy). The candidate should have expertise in experimental work, for both material science and process technology, to demonstrate the new redox flow battery technology at cell level.

Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) is seeking applications for a postdoctoral researcher in the area of Scalable Graph Learning, within the Department of Software Technology in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science.

Graph machine learning (Graph ML) is a rapidly growing area of artificial intelligence (AI), driven by the widespread presence of graph-structured data across many real-world domains. Graph neural networks (GNNs) lie at the core of this field and have proven effective in a wide range of applications, including recommender systems, financial crime detection, cybersecurity, and network analysis. This project focuses on scalable, parallel, distributed, federated, and hardware-accelerated training and inference of GNNs and graph transformers, with applications in the financial domain. In particular, it targets the analysis of financial transaction networks for the detection and prevention of financial crime. Robustness and resilience under data heterogeneity and adversarial conditions will also be investigated.

Energy storage is an indispensable factor for bridging the electricity consumption with the intermittent renewable energy supply. Electricity grids face significant challenges in balancing economic growth with sustainability targets. Rapid electrification across industrial, transport, commercial, and residential sectors strains existing grid infrastructure, leading to congestion and transmission bottlenecks. These issues limit the integration of renewable energy. Long-duration energy storage (LDES), that provide 8+ hours of storage, can balance intermittent production and demand, thereby stabilizing the grid, reducing reliance on fossil fuels, and ensuring more effective use of renewable energy. TenneT expects 4.9 GW of large-scale battery storage is required in The Netherlands by 2030, while there was only 0.14 GW installed in 2023. Hence, a rapid scale-up of LDES is needed.

In that light, we started a collaborative project, with universities (TU Delft, UTwente, TU/Eindhoven, HAN) and companies (AQUABATTERY, Elestor, Exergy Storage, RWE, Nobian), to develop batteries for long-duration energy storage. Specifically, this postdoc position focuses on acid-base flow batteries, and more specifically the stack engineering in this system. Acid-base flow batteries are based on dissociating water into acid and base during charging, using bipolar membranes, and recombining acid and base in this membrane to retrieve electrical energy.

We’re looking for an excellent postdoc, with strong membrane development skills, to study development of bipolar membranes for acid-base flow batteries. In close collaboration with researchers at TU/Eindhoven and AQUABATTERY, we’ll develop new bipolar membranes with high water dissociation efficiency, low resistance, and high selectivity. You’ll develop new materials and new configurations to improve the membrane performance, and you’ll analyze the directions for improvement. You’ll also study possible other membrane-related aspects and other applications for the same materials. Part of the job is to educate students in courses related to the research.

In case you’re interested in working with flow batteries for long-duration energy storage, and not particularly in bipolar membrane development, please feel free to also look at other vacancies posted at the same time in the framework of the REDOX BLEND project. 

The postdoctoral research is part of the NWO project “PAving THe way towards Zero-Emission and RObust inland shipping (PATH2ZERO)”, which aims to develop breakthrough action perspectives and sustainable business models for all parties in the inland shipping chain, contributing to the transition to emission-free inland shipping. The main objective of the project is the evaluation of zero-emission strategies, the effectiveness of policies and technologies, and the assessment of the consequences of their implementation on the inland shipping system.

One aim of the PATH2ZERO project is to translate research outcomes into practice, so that end users can make better-informed decisions. For this purpose, PATH2ZERO aims to develop a digital twin. The main goal of this data-driven virtual representation of the inland waterway transport system is to assess the efficiency of proposed solutions for emissions reduction in inland waterway transport. Three main aspects are regarded as vital components of the digital twin: the individual vessels, fleet and its operations, and the infrastructure.

As these components require a detailed representation within a large-scale transport system, a meso-scale agent-based approach has been selected as a suitable basis for the digital twin. This enables the assessment of potential interventions, ranging from the application of new technologies to individual vessels to policy measures that are implemented for an entire shipping corridor, or various bunker infrastructure strategies in the network. In addition, the impact of the feasible interventions can be evaluated, ranging from the individual ship level and its emissions to the network level and the aggregated emissions in an entire area, or the impact on the logistics chain.

For validating the digital twin, real-world data sources (AIS data, hydrodynamic data, infrastructure data, etc.) will be used in combination with already existing tools for maritime traffic simulation (e.g., OpenTNSim, which is being developed at TU Delft), energy consumption estimates, and emission algorithms. The relevant processes at the individual vessel level can be modelled in detail, and their performance can be tracked in time and space. Corridor scale effects will be simulated by aggregating the results of multiple vessels that together represent the corridor’s traffic.

Three regions will be modelled as areas of interest: the Rotterdam – Basel corridor (an open waterway, that is vulnerable to high and low discharge events), the Rotterdam – Antwerp / Gent corridor (a closed waterway that includes various locks and short-sea shipping), and the larger Port of Rotterdam region (a region that includes both sea-going and inland vessels in an area subject to currents and tides).

While the scope of this research focuses on validating a digital twin using operational data from inland vessels, it is expected to involve close collaboration with project stakeholders and researchers within the project. This collaboration will contribute to the quantitative assessment of emission reduction strategies, paving the way toward zero-emission inland shipping.

We are seeking a postdoctoral researcher to lead TU Delft’s contribution to the Stritvaiz project, which transforms a former inner-city Amsterdam gas station into a multifunctional mobility and energy hub combining fast-charging, energy storage, shared mobility, logistics, and neighbourhood services. The postdoc will develop optimization methods for allocating scarce physical space and time slots among these competing functions across fluctuating daily demand: building demand scenarios from stakeholder interviews, questionnaires, and travel-behaviour literature; consolidating them into a Programme of Requirements; and formulating and implementing a mathematical model that assigns spaces and time slots in response to demand patterns, pricing incentives, and policy constraints, while producing KPIs such as demand served and rejected per user group.

Working with partners including AMS Institute, the Municipality of Amsterdam, PON and TotalEnergies, the researcher will calibrate and validate the model using real operational data from the E-lympic “living lab” and translate the results into recommendations for converting urban gas stations into multimodal hubs. The ideal candidate holds a PhD in transport, operations research, civil engineering, or a related field, with strong skills in mathematical optimization and modelling (ideally in Python) and an interest in sustainable urban mobility.

The BODIES group, at the department of Biomechanical Engineering TU Delft seeks a motivated postdoctoral researcher for a full-time, fully funded, 30-month project on Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) shorts to improve gait after stroke. You will work closely with Sint Maartenskliniek and Biomex, embedded in the multidisciplinary “Care is coming home!” program, a 5-year consortium of 2 technical universities (TU Delft, UTwente), 6 hospitals (including Sint Maartenskliniek), 13 companies (including Biomex), 1 rehabilitation centre, and 5 patient organisations (including Hersenletsel.nl and Hersenstichting).

The Challenge

Stroke survivors often have reduced knee flexion and propulsive push-off, impairments with a major impact on mobility and fall risk, with no effective clinical intervention currently available. Recent research showed that FES of the hamstrings during push-off can enhance gait after stroke. This position builds on those findings: you will adapt an existing FES shorts system for stroke rehabilitation, test and optimize it with patients, retrain the stimulation-control algorithm for stroke-specific gait, and evaluate usability, comfort, and fit during prolonged use. You will also initiate adaptable, IMU-based stimulation control synchronized to each patient’s evolving gait dynamics as they recover.

(18) Postdoctoral Fellowship Position

Postdoc Fellowship Position summary/title: Postdoc in Physics‑Informed Machine Learning for Hybrid Traffic Prediction

Deadline : 2 Aug 2026

View details & Apply

The Human-Centered Design Department at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering of TU Delft is looking for a highly motivated postdoctoral researcher to join the European Horizon Europe project AutHUMate (Adaptive User Training & Human-Technology Interaction Strategy for Enhanced Traffic Safety).

AutHUMate investigates how automated driving systems (SAE Level 2–3) can interact with drivers in ways that are safe, adaptive, understandable, and trustworthy. As vehicles become increasingly automated, new challenges emerge around human-technology interaction, such as trust in automation, transitions of control, driver awareness, and the communication of system capabilities and limitations. The project brings together expertise from human-computer interaction, AI, human factors, cognitive science, and mobility research to develop adaptive interaction and training strategies for automated driving.

At TU Delft, the postdoctoral researcher will contribute primarily to the design exploration and prototype implementation of adaptive human-machine interaction concepts that integrate technical innovation with human-centred design principles and societal readiness considerations.

The candidate will work in the HorizonEurope Project WARRANT (www.warrant-project.eu) with 13 partners,  pursuing innovative research to meet the following objectives: (1) The functional analysis and reliability assessment of waterborne digital systems, addressing the growing adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Remote & Autonomous shipping, and the increasing cybersecurity threat landscape; (2) The experimentation and validation of the WARRANT methods and platforms in Living Labs with representative stakeholders concerned with waterborne digital systems dependability innovations, and safe, secure and resilient operations of digitalized ships, (3) the scientific dissemination and communication, and industry engagement.

The candidate will work in the department of Maritime and Transport Engineering (MTT) of Mechanical Engineering Faculty and will be a senior researcher in the SAFE-NET group (https://www.safe-net.team/). He/she will enjoy interacting with the MTT Young Professionals (https://mtt-colloquium.github.io/index.html) and the researchers of the Transport Engineering & Logistics Section, and joining social activities.

Advancement of aerial robotics are reshaping the future of construction.  In the HARPA project funded by the EIC Pathfinder Challenge, you will explore how heterogeneous aerial robotics teams can collaboratively and autonomously assemble a pavilion. Together with other team members and collaborators from TUM and ETH, at the end of the project will perform a real-world demonstration of the autonomous assembly of a pre-fabricated pavilion using a team of aerial robots.

HARPA is looking for a highlyg motivated and competent postdoctoral researcher.

You will develop task-level planning and coordination methods for heterogeneous aerial robotic teams composed of Cable-Suspended Aerial Multi-Lifting Systems (CAMLs) and Aerial Robotic Manipulators (ARMs). The research will address fundamental challenges in multi-agent planning under heterogeneous robot capabilities, dynamic constraints, contact-rich interactions, perception limitations, and high-level human guidance. A key objective is to bridge high-level task planning with the physical constraints of aerial manipulation and cooperative construction, enabling robotic teams to reason not only about what tasks to perform, but also about when, how, and by which robotic platform they should be executed.

In close collaboration with PhD researchers and project partners from TUM and ETH, you will contribute to the development of novel control and learning methods for aerial manipulators and multi-drone system and to the development of a physics-aware digital twin for aerial robotic construction. This digital twin will integrate robot dynamics, aerodynamics, contact interactions, component geometry, and construction-task constraints, supporting real-time 3D visualization, human monitoring, algorithm testing, and pre-assembly validation. The platform will serve both as a research environment for developing and benchmarking planning algorithms, and as a system-level validation tool before real-world deployment.

By the end of the contract, the postdoctoral researcher is expected to play a leading role in enabling coordinated collaboration between CAMLs and ARMs for the assembly of prefabricated building submodules. The candidate will be encouraged to publish in leading robotics venues, help shape the research direction of task-level planning for heterogeneous aerial construction systems and collaborate with other team members. The position offers the opportunity to contribute to both high-impact academic research and a large-scale robotic construction demonstration within an international EU project.

The position is available with a flexible start date to be agreed upon. The postdoctoral  researcher will join the Autonomous Multi-Robots Lab at the Cognitive Robotics Department and will be supervised by Dr. Sihao Sun and Prof. Javier Alonso-Mora. You will also have the chance to collaborate and visit our partners from ETH Zurich and TU Munich. As part of the postdoctoral position, there will be opportunities to gain teaching experience in the relevant courses and/or supervising MSc and PhD students.

The project ‘From EXperiment to sustainable change: TRAnsformative methodologies for Innovation and learning’ (EXTRA) seeks to overcome a persistent “pilot paradox”. In this paradox, much experimentation takes place but long-term systemic impact remains difficult. Researchers together with all sorts of change makers will synthesise existing knowledge on how to mainstream, upscale, spread, broaden and deepen developed innovations. In this postdoc position you will be employed at the Multi Actor Systems Department and co-supervised by the Rotterdam School of Law.

You will work together with a transdisciplinary action research team of 3 PhD researchers (VU Organizational Sciences/VU Athena Institute/WUR), one post doc (TU Delft TBM) and three senior researchers (HvA/HR).

Your role will be to synthesize existing research on regulatory innovations and policy experiments that contribute to sustainability transitions in the area of renewable energy, circularity and biodiversity.

You will also conduct transdisciplinary action research together with societal partners that are working in temporary experimental environment environments (such as AMS Institute, Bouwlab, Dreamhûs, Nationaal Programma Samen Nieuw-West, PRICE Almere, The Green Village Delft) and actors working on experiments on the level of the regime (Ministerie van VRO, Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving en Provincie Noord-Holland). Together with the action researchers they have developed a Dynamic Learning Agenda of learning questions that they want to address during the trajectory of the project.

Together with Afdeling Buitengewone Zaken and the postdoc/action researchers, you will work on action research that may help them in answering their questions and develop designs for interfaces between experiments and policymakers that partners can implement in their practices and institutions.

On the basis of your experiences, you will get the opportunity to experiment with (co)producing different outputs, including but not limited to academic articles, articles for a lay audience and a podcast.