Scientific Engineer in Transformative Geo-Analytical Question Answering

The project aims to answer queries beyond the straightwards retrieval of answers by enabling interaction with geodata infrastructures through dynamically constructed workflows. The selection of relevant geodata (maps), the construction and execution of workflows (i.e., transformations), and ensuring their semantic validity and correctness all play a crucial role in generating answers in the form of answer maps. You will explore these challenges together with the Principal Investigator as well as a postdoctoral researcher and two PhD candidates. We are looking for a motivated candidate with strong technical and programming skills and relevant project experience to join this interdisciplinary research team at the forefront of GeoAI and question answering research.

You will contribute primarily to three areas: data, implementation, and infrastructure with user studies.

Data
You will work closely with PhD candidates on data curation, particularly on datasets that can serve as gold standards for training and evaluation. Your responsibilities will include interacting with (geo)data repositories, performing semantic annotation, improving data quality by data refinement (e.g., correcting mislabelled records), construction and use of knowledge graphs, and transforming data between different representations. In addition, you will contribute to enriching (meta)data with semantic information and collaborate with PhD candidates on the selection, parsing, and representation of questions. You will also help with the modelling and validation of workflows. You are expected to follow open science principles and support data management, documentation, and long-term preservation. Some potential collaboration with Dutch partner institutions is expected for this part.

Implementation
You will develop data analysis scripts to assess and improve data quality. Your main responsibility will be to collaborate with PhD candidates and the postdoctoral researcher on the representation and generation of workflows that transform (geo)data into answers to user questions. You are expected to be open to exploring hybrid approaches that combine symbolic and sub-symbolic AI methods. On the symbolic AI side, you will co-develop a typed language for constructing and querying GIS workflows. On the sub-symbolic side, you may be involved in post-training LLMs, in developing agentic AI systems, and building tools for manual evaluation. Therefore, familiarity with typed query languages, GIS workflows, as well as high-performance computing (HPC) and agentic AI approaches would be beneficial. In addition, you will contribute to the design and selection of metrics for validating and evaluating generated answers.

Infrastructure with user Studies
User studies form an important part of the project's evaluation strategy. You will support the deployment of such Q&A infrastructure on available servers. Together with PhD candidates, you will develop interfaces for collecting user input and system responses. You will also collaborate on the analysis and evaluation of collected data and ensure that all data are properly anonymised before publication.

Postdoctoral Researcher in Cognitive Psychology

As a postdoctoral researcher, you will join the AttentionLab within the Department of Experimental Psychology. You will play a central role in a VICI-funded research programme investigating the relationship between pupil dynamics, visual attention and cognitive processing.

Your responsibilities include:

• designing, programming and conducting behavioural and pupillometry experiments;
• collecting, processing and analysing eye-tracking and pupil data;
• contributing to the development of new experimental paradigms for studying attention;
• collaborating with PhD candidates and other researchers within the AttentionLab;
• supervising research assistants and MSc students where appropriate;
• presenting research findings at international conferences and publishing results in leading scientific journals.

PhD "Climate, Cooperation and Community in Asia"

Climate change poses a serious challenge to social cohesion in the coming decades. Extreme weather events, disruptions to food or water supplies, and the pressure to adopt new agricultural practices are already becoming increasingly visible, straining relations between people and decreasing trust in the institutions that guide collective responses. Communities are divided along existing fault lines such as those of neighbourhood, class, gender, and caste, or along new dimensions. Understanding how communities sustain or lose their ability to cooperate under climate induced pressures is an urgent question with implications for future adaptation policies around the world. In the post WWII period, rural societies in Asian countries underwent a dramatic transformation. The introduction of new agricultural technologies increased crop productivity and rural incomes. At the same time, these changes reshaped economic, political, and social power in rural communities. They also exposed farmers to new forms of climate risk. Focusing on local processes during this period allows us to trace when and why cooperation breaks down or endures, and to assess the consequences for sustainable development.

The project asks the following interlinked questions. How did climate change affect social cohesion at intra- and inter-group levels in rural Asian communities? And what can this tell us about how communities respond to climate-based disruption more generally?

These overarching questions open onto several potential research avenues, that can be pursued depending on the candidate’s interests and expertise as well as data availability. This could include research focused within or across countries, as well as across different levels and dimensions of cooperation. We expect such a project to require engagement with quantitative and qualitative sources, with the possibility of fieldwork. Through a comparative and long run study of rural Asia, the project will investigate interactions between climate, institutions and cooperative behaviour to understand the drivers of cooperation through historical analysis, with additional insight from the field of social psychology. By clarifying when cooperation succeeds or fails in historically climate-vulnerable agricultural contexts, the project offers lessons for climate adaptation in other countries around the world.

Postdoc Position in Computational Antigen Discovery

As a Postdoctoral Researcher in the group of dr Marino, you will play a central role in advancing the group's research through the development and application of state-of-the-art bioinformatics workflows for antigen identification, quantification, and validation.

You will support the whole team in data analysis and visualization for different proteogenomics projects. You will organize and merge multi-omics data (in collaboration with our partners at Princess Maxima Center) using AI/ML techniques, implement antigen data analysis and discovery processes, and contribute to the maintenance of data infrastructure in collaboration with internal team members and other multidisciplinary teams.

In this role, you will also take the lead in developing new ideas and initiatives that advance the group’s research. This position will significantly impact the team by developing innovative bioinformatics pipelines, and by pinpointing and measuring the most immunogenic antigens for integration into vaccine-based therapies aimed at improving outcomes for patients with cancer.

Finally, you will be involved in many different multicentered and multidisciplinary collaborations, with both industry as well as academia and medical institutes. This will increase your exposure and expand your own professional network, supporting your future scientific career.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain scalable pipelines for mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics and immunopeptidomics data analysis.
• Design integrative frameworks combining genomics, transcriptomics, ribosomal profiling and proteomics datasets.
• Develop and maintain high-quality pipelines for processing and visualizing large-scale proteogenomics, MS-based immunopeptidomics/proteomics data.
• Ensure reproducibility and scalability of workflows using modern workflow tools (es. Nextflow, Snakemake, CWL etc.).
• Contribute to scientific publications, grant writing, and presentations.
• Collaborate with internal/external groups to develop new analysis pipelines tailored to immunopeptidomics experiments.
• Stay at the forefront of scientific advances in mass spectrometry-based immunopeptidomics/proteomics including software and new methodologies.

Assistant Admissions Officer

Als Assistant Admissions Officer ben je verantwoordelijk voor het coördineren en uitvoeren van administratieve processen binnen de aanmeldprocedure voor studenten met een buitenlandse vooropleiding. Hiervoor heb je regelmatig contact met collega's van faculteiten en andere afdelingen binnen de universiteit.

Je belangrijkste taken zijn:

• controleren en verwerken van aanmelddocumenten op volledigheid en echtheid;
• communiceren met aankomende studenten over hun aanmelding, voornamelijk via e-mail;
• afhandelen van binnenkomende Colloquium Doctum-aanvragen;
• controleren van de status van aanvragen voor vrijstelling van het aanvraagtarief en zorg ervoor dat de benodigde documenten correct worden ingediend.
• werkprocedures binnen ISA evalueren en verbeteren.

Tijdens drukke periodes ondersteun je ook collega’s van andere subteams, zoals visa, studiebeurzen en diplomawaardering. Dit biedt je de kans om nieuwe vaardigheden te ontwikkelen en breder bij te dragen aan het team, buiten je functie als Assistant Admissions Officer.