PhD position on The coupled soil carbon-nitrogen-phosphorus cycles

Soils are the largest terrestrial reservoirs of carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P), playing a crucial role in global biogeochemical cycles. The soil cycles of C, N, and P interact dynamically with each other, but some of their individual pathways also differ. Spatial heterogeneity and temporal changes in climate, hydrological cycle, atmospheric chemical components, soil physiochemical properties, vegetations, and human activities (e.g., land-use change, agriculture, urbanization) collectively lead to changes in soil C-N-P cycling.

In this four-year study, you will develop a state-of-art global spatially explicit, integrated, mechanistic, coupled soil biogeochemistry model for the dynamic interconnected C-N-P cycling. This model will build on our pioneering model framework Integrated Model to Assess the Global Environment-Dynamic Global Nutrient Model (IMAGE-DGNM), which tracks the changes in climate, hydrological cycle, land cover, and human activities since the pre-industrial era. You will collect and synthesize the latest field and remote-sensing-based observation databases and reported coupled kinetics from labs and culture experiments, and use them to construct and validate the model. On this basis, we will quantify the spatiotemporal changes in global soil coupled C-N-P cycling from the pre-industrial era till the present and assess the influences of climate change and a variety of human activities. Questions regarding the interdependencies among C, N and P will be the research focus, such as how nutrient imbalance regulates/disrupts global soil C sequestration and how CO2 fertilization influences N and P storage in soils and loss to waters and the atmosphere. We will further run the model to project their future changes under different scenarios. We invite you to share your ideas and suggestions for this innovative project in your application letter.

A personalised training programme will be set up, reflecting your training needs and career objectives. About 20% of your time will be dedicated to this training component, which includes following courses/workshops as well as training on the job in assisting in the Bachelor’s and Master’s programmes of the department at Utrecht University.

PhD in human in-vitro immunotherapy testing for autoimmune disease

Ombion Centre for Animal-Free Biomedical Translation (Ombion) is a new national centre dedicated to accelerating the transition of biomedical innovations without relying on animal testing. Together with a large number of national and international partners, Ombion will work on the development and dissemination of animal-free biomedical innovation and expertise within different transition projects: ALS, cystic fibrosis, asthma & COPD, and Osteoarthritis & Rheumatoid arthritis.

Within this project we focus on new platforms to study immunmodulation in rheumatoid arthritis, and build upon expertise within the group and the wider consortium. Collectively, we combine expertise in immunological assays, 3D organ models, and antibody-based therapies. As a team, we prioritise effective collaboration, ongoing feedback, and both professional and personal development.

At Utrecht University there are plenty of opportunities to facilitate your development. We currently have two PhD positions available: You will be working closely together within the group but also with other partners as this project is a collaboration between the Immunology group of the Division of Infectious diseases & Immunology, Faculty Veterinary Medicine, at Utrecht University, Mimetas and Genmab and the group of Prof Tim Welting (Maastricht UMC+).

During you PhD trajectory, you will experience working in a collaborative project with academic partners and life science companies. You will also enrol in the Graduate School of Life Sciences (GSLS) Infectious diseases and Immunology programme and will be working in a supporting team environment were there is room for you personal development.

PhD position 1
So far, the development of novel immunotherapies, such as vaccines and therapeutic antibodies, requires animal testing due to the need for a functional immune system. Conventional 2D culture systems fail to capture the complexity of the immune system. To overcome these limitations, this PhD project will focus on developing and applying lymph node-on-a-chip (LN-on-a-chip) platforms. Your tasks:

• You set up co-culture of multiple immune cell types in a physiologically relevant microenvironment.
• You validate the system by observing cell–cell interactions, organized tissue-like structures, and functional immune responses using techniques such as microscopy, flow cytometry, ELISA.
• You use the system to model human diseases using patient material - Screen novel immunotherapies for efficacy.

PhD position 2
Therapies for autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA) aim to dampen chronic inflammatory responses. We have identified regulatory T cells recognising a conserved stress-induced antigen as promising therapeutic means to halt disease progression. This PhD project will explore the mechanisms underlying the activation and acquisition of regulatory function in stress-induced T cells in patients with RA. Your tasks:

• You clone the TCR of available stress antigen-specific regulatory T cells and introduce into different cell reporter systems.
• You set up co-cultures of primary and reporter cells to determine the conditions leading to acquisition of regulatory function in T cells - Stratify a cohort of RA patients based on therapies received and test for regulatory T cell function.
• You screen novel stress-associated T cell ligands for immune regulatory potential.

IT Infrastructure Engineer

Je beheert en ontwikkelt de technische infrastructuur van de universiteit. Jouw focus ligt op het beheer van Windows servers. Daarnaast ondersteun je de teams voor storage, virtualisatie en databases. Je zorgt voor stabiliteit via lifecycle management, vereenvoudigt en moderniseert de omgeving en werkt mee aan de transitie naar een toekomstbestendig platform.

Je werkt in een multidisciplinair team met engineers, de platform lead en architecten.

Jouw werkzaamheden:

• monitoren en analyseren van systeemprestaties, het identificeren van knelpunten en het implementeren van verbeteringen;
• samenwerken met cross-functionele teams om technische oplossingen te ontwerpen en implementeren;
• reguliere beheertaken uitvoeren, waaronder monitoring, performance management, incident management, change management en onderhoud;
• technische ontwerpen en beheerinstructies documenteren en up-to-date houden;
• adviseren over de aanschaf en inrichting van automation en scripting tools;
• junior teamleden coachen en begeleiden en kennis en best practices delen.

1 februari 2026 start de nieuwe organisatiestructuur van ITS. Je maakt deel uit van System Teams Infrastructuur, met zo’n 30 collega’s, een leidinggevende en een platform lead. Samen werken jullie aan de verdere ontwikkeling van de infrastructuur, volgens agile principes.

Postdoc: Historic Land Use reconstruction for the Global Carbon Project

The legacy of LULCC decisions today will impact the remaining carbon budget required to achieve climate targets in the coming decades. The incompatibility in the application of these modeling methods presents a fundamental challenge to close the GCB. GCB is the most comprehensive source of data and information about regional-to-global scale carbon fluxes and is updated annually and published at the UNFCCC COP meetings every year. The Combining LAnd-use, modeling and Remote-sensing to Transform carbon budgets (CLARiTy) project will reduce the persistently high land flux uncertainties by an order of magnitude. Achieving this goal will require a combination of new datasets, a deeper process-understanding, sophisticated models and an improved experimental design.

The aim of CLARiTy is to close the GCB by delivering and operationalizing a consistent data-driven framework for GCB updates and providing accurate estimates of the terrestrial CO2 sources and sinks. CLARiTy will also resolve discrepancies in GCB land components to fully reconcile GCB with country-level estimates by National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, contributing to a better informed Global Stocktake.

One of your tasks is to improve the existing land change dataset HYDE (History of the Global Environment, Klein Goldewijk et al., 2017) and to develop a new dataset by connecting to the high-resolution, multi-year Earth Observation data (HILDA+ dataset), hence adding new historical land use classes such as forest, natural grasslands and barren. You will benefit from the expertise of two co-leads in the CLARiTy project: Kees Klein Goldewijk, one of world’s leading researchers on historical land use reconstructions and developer of the HYDE database at the Land Change Lab of Utrecht University; and Richard Fuchs/Karin Winkler, developers of the HILDA+ database at Wageningen University Research (WUR, The Netherlands) and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT, both now based at Garmisch Partenkirchen, Germany).

IT Procesmanager

Als IT Procesmanager bewaak je het release- en changemanagementproces, met ondersteuning van proces-coördinatoren. Je stuurt bij waar nodig en je zorgt dat de processen goed aansluiten op Agile werken en nieuwe thema’s zoals NIS2 en AI. Je werkt nauw samen met je team en maakt processen slimmer en toekomstbestendig.

Concreet ga je:

• het Change Advisory Board (CAB) voorzitten en besluiten begeleiden;
• het changemanagementproces beheren en waar nodig verbeteren;
• rapportages aanleveren ten behoeve van maand- en jaarrapportages;
• releasemanagement inrichten en verder ontwikkelen;
• releasemanagement afstemmen op een Agile manier van werken;
• onderzoeken hoe je AI-toepassingen kunt inzetten om processen slimmer te maken.

Je doet dit samen met je team, bestaande uit: een Incident- en Problem Manager, een Configuration Manager en twee IT Service Continuity Managers. In dit team combineren we ambities met een prettige sfeer. Collega’s omschrijven de werkomgeving als open, vriendelijk en gericht op positief gedrag. Initiatief nemen wordt gewaardeerd en er is altijd ruimte voor verbetering en ontwikkeling.