Docent Ontwikkelingspsychologie

Bij de afdeling Ontwikkelingspsychologie van de Faculteit Sociale Wetenschappen zoeken we twee nieuwe collega's voor het (klinisch) onderwijs dat deze afdeling verzorgt in de overwegend Nederlandstalige bacheloropleiding Psychologie en in de Engelstalige masteropleiding Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology.

Het onderwijs betreft onder meer onderwijs gericht op de (klinische) ontwikkelingspsychologie, psychodiagnostiek (methoden, besluitvorming, BAPD-begeleiding), behandeling en interventies (methoden, attitude) en het begeleiden van studenten bij hun professionele ontwikkeling (stage) en het schrijven van hun thesis. Merendeels betreft dit werkgroeponderwijs en individuele studentbegeleiding.

Postdoc position in CO2 electrocatalysis

This collaborative project between the Alta and Thevenon groups aims to address this challenge by developing molecular additives to functionalize metal-free electrodes for selective methane production. Building on our previous work, we seek to enhance the performance of our electrolyzer system — including current density, selectivity, energy efficiency, and long-term stability — while simultaneously gaining mechanistic insight at the molecular level.

As a postdoc in this project, you will play a key role in designing and synthesizing molecular additives, electrochemical evaluation, and mechanistic studies to advance the fundamental understanding and industrial scalability of CO2-to-methane conversion.

Postdoc on Marine Pollution, Mixture Toxicology and One Health Modelling

Are you an ambitious researcher eager to advance the scientific understanding of marine pollution and its consequences for ecosystems, food safety, and human health? Do you want to work at the interface of ecological modelling, mixture toxicology, and One Health within a major European consortium?

The project
Marine ecosystems harbor complex mixtures of contaminants, including emerging pollutants and experience shifts in microbial communities linked to specific contamination, such as plastics. HARMONY addresses this gap by developing integrated approaches to assess mixture toxicity, bioaccumulation, ecological risks, and possible associated effects on human health. WP4, led by IRAS (UU), investigates how pollutants and mixtures propagate from individual organisms through food webs to humans. The work strategically combines reuse of European monitoring datasets (e.g. WFD and EMODnet), laboratory experiments, field observations, advanced modelling approaches, and mechanistic analyses. The objective is to generate robust and time-efficient evidence on bioaccumulation, biomagnification, ecological impacts, seafood safety, and plastic-promoted antimicrobial resistance (AMR), applying a One Health perspective.

Your responsibilities
As a postdoctoral researcher, you will contribute to and help integrate several tasks: You will contribute to modelling bioaccumulation and biomagnification of priority pollutants and mixtures across aquatic food webs. Empirical measurements from laboratory and field studies will be integrated into chemical fate and trophic transfer models, including the Merlin-Expo platform and physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) approaches. You will contribute to estimating bioaccumulation, biomagnification and trophic magnification factors, and link modelling outputs to spatial and temporal monitoring data across Europe.

You will help uncover how pollution reshapes life in our seas—from the biology of individual organisms to the health of entire populations, and ultimately to people. Using a multi-scale modelling framework that links Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB/DEBtox) theory, Species Sensitivity Distributions, and Individual-Based Models, you will translate sublethal and chronic contaminant exposure into mechanistic insights on growth, reproduction, and long-term population viability under realistic environmental scenarios.

By connecting these ecological outcomes to seafood safety, you will bridge ecosystem change and human health. Through cumulative exposure assessments (following EFSA guidelines), Monte Carlo–based probabilistic modelling, and dietary variability analyses, you will evaluate indirect health risks and nutritional consequences for different consumer groups. A key innovation lies in integrating ecological model outputs directly into food availability and food safety assessments—advancing a truly systems-based perspective.

In parallel, you will explore long-term exposure patterns in harbor porpoises using retrospective blubber samples (2009–2025) from the UU biobank. By combining chemical monitoring data with epigenetic analyses and meta-regression approaches, you will investigate how chronic pollution relates to marine mammal mortality.

Beyond the research itself, you will share findings through publications and international conferences, while shaping new funding initiatives in marine pollution, water quality, and environmental health. Together, this work contributes to a central One Health question: how do environmental changes influence the intertwined health of humans, animals, and ecosystems?

During the project lifetime (September 2026–September 2029), you will travel to India twice for collaboration meetings and joint research activities.

PhD “Reclaiming EdTech Imaginaries” (NWO Vidi)

The project addresses this question through an empirical investigation of Digital Autonomy Innovators (DAIs)—pioneering yet often fragmented initiatives across Europe that seek to safeguard public values in digital education. These initiatives experiment with alternative approaches to educational technologies and infrastructures, ranging from new forms of collective imagination and design practices to the development of public digital infrastructures. Within the project, these efforts are studied across three interrelated domains: imaginaries (PhD), design (Postdoc), and infrastructures (PI, Dr. Niels Kerssens).

Building on these empirical insights, RECLaiM-EDU aims to advance a new conceptual understanding of digital autonomy as a distinctly European strategy for securing public value in education amid rapid digitalization and deepening technological dependencies. This theoretical and empirical work will feed into the co-creation of the Digital Autonomy Framework for European Public Education (DAF-EU): a strategic roadmap and call to action designed to stimulate bottom-up, public-interest innovation across Europe and to support schools in reclaiming agency over their digital classrooms.

As a PhD researcher within the RECLaiM-EDU project, you will lead the project’s imaginaries pillar. Your research will examine how practices of world-building, future-making, and speculation shape alternative visions of digital education and open up possibilities for more democratic technological futures in European primary and secondary education. You will conduct in-depth empirical research on pioneering initiatives across Europe while developing a strong analytical and conceptual approach to imaginaries as a pathway toward digital autonomy in education.

Working in close collaboration with the PI and the postdoc, you will be an integral member of a dynamic research team and actively engage with academic and societal partners across Europe. In doing so, you will contribute to positioning RECLaiM-EDU at the forefront of scholarly and public debates on digital autonomy, democratic innovation, and the future of digital education.

Your main duties and responsibilities include:

• developing an independent research plan on Reclaiming EdTech Imaginaries, aligned with the empirical, theoretical, and practice-oriented objectives of the Vidi project;
• conducting high-quality empirical research (e.g., case studies, participatory research, qualitative fieldwork, document analysis) in close collaboration with the PI and the Postdoc;
• publishing in leading international peer-reviewed journals and contributing to edited volumes or policy-oriented publications where relevant;
• presenting research findings at international conferences, workshops, and academic networks;
• contributing to the development of the Digital Autonomy Framework for European Public Education (DAF-EU);
• supporting the organization of international symposia and a final international conference;
• engaging with stakeholders in education, policy, and civil society, including reactive and proactive policy engagement at national and European levels;
• contributing to public communication and media engagement, such as podcasts, opinion pieces, and knowledge dissemination activities;
• participating actively in the intellectual life of the research group, including seminars, reading groups, and collaborative writing processes.

Postdoc “Reclaiming EdTech Design” (NWO Vidi)

The project addresses this question through an empirical investigation of Digital Autonomy Innovators (DAIs)—pioneering yet often fragmented initiatives across Europe that seek to safeguard public values in digital education. These initiatives experiment with alternative approaches to educational technologies and infrastructures, ranging from new forms of collective imagination and design practices to the development of public digital infrastructures. Within the project, these efforts are studied across three interrelated domains: imaginaries (PhD), design (Postdoc), and infrastructures (PI, Dr. Niels Kerssens).

Building on these empirical insights, RECLaiM-EDU aims to advance a new conceptual understanding of digital autonomy as a distinctly European strategy for securing public value in education amid rapid digitalization and deepening technological dependencies. This theoretical and empirical work will feed into the co-creation of the Digital Autonomy Framework for European Public Education (DAF-EU): a strategic roadmap and call to action designed to stimulate bottom-up, public-interest innovation across Europe and to support schools in reclaiming agency over their digital classrooms.

As a Postdoctoral Researcher within the RECLaiM-EDU project, you will lead the project’s design pillar. Your research will investigate how practices of co-design, public governance, and public–private collaboration can contribute to more democratic forms of educational technology in European primary and secondary education. Therefore, you will conduct in-depth empirical research on pioneering initiatives across Europe that experiment with alternative approaches to the design and governance of digital education technologies.

As a senior member of the research team, you will have considerable intellectual freedom to shape the project’s design pathway and play a key role in advancing its theoretical development and practice-oriented outputs. You will collaborate closely with the PI and the PhD candidate and engage with academic and societal partners across Europe, helping to position RECLaiM-EDU at the forefront of scholarly and public debates on digital autonomy and democratic innovation in education.

Your main duties and responsibilities include:

• developing and refining a coherent postdoctoral research line within the broader empirical, theoretical, and practical objectives of the RECLaiM-EDU project;
• conducting high-quality empirical research (e.g., case studies, participatory research, qualitative fieldwork, document analysis) in close collaboration with the PI and the PhD;
• contributing to the development of the Digital Autonomy Framework for European Public Education (DAF-EU);
• publishing research findings in leading international peer-reviewed journals and contributing to high-impact collective publications;
• actively presenting research at major international conferences and contributing to the international visibility of the project;
• coordinating a Special Issue in a leading international journal on Digital Autonomy, including developing the call for papers, managing peer review processes in collaboration with guest editors and journal editors, and ensuring intellectual coherence of the collection;
• contributing to the organization of international symposia, workshops, and a major international conference connected to the project;
• supporting the supervision and intellectual development of the PhD candidate and, where relevant, research assistants or interns;
• engaging with societal stakeholders (e.g., schools, teacher educators, policymakers, sectoral organizations) and contributing to knowledge exchange and societal impact activities;
• contributing to dissemination beyond academia (e.g., policy briefs, professional publications, public events);
• contributing to future grant applications and the strategic development of follow-up research initiatives;
• participating actively in the intellectual life of the research group, including seminars, reading groups, and collaborative writing processes.