PhD position in Microbial Electrochemistry for Purple Phototrophic Bacteria

We are seeking a dedicated professional to advance the production of high value bioproducts from Purple Phototrophic Bacteria (PPB) using photo-bioelectrochemical systems. Are you passionate to work on production of high-value products like amino acids, pigments and coenzyme Q10? Do you want to develop a strategy to steer growth and composition of PPB with light and electrodes? Are you motivated to work closely together with another PhD candidate located in Antwerp? Are you the PhD student we are looking for?

What are you going to do?
We are seeking two full time PhD candidates with a strong background in applied microbiology and bioprocess engineering to join Purple Spark, a pioneering collaborative project between Environmental Technology at Wageningen University & Research and the Biobased Sustainability Engineering (SUSTAIN) group at the University of Antwerp. Purple Spark aims to uncover how external electron inputs shape the metabolism of Purple Phototrophic Bacteria, addressing key gaps in phototrophic metabolism, microbial electrochemistry and biological nitrogen fixation. The work is expected to lead to the discovery or enrichment of strains with superior nitrogen fixation capacity and electroactivity. The partnership combines leading expertise in microbial electrochemistry and purple biotechnology, providing a solid basis for advancing photobioelectrochemical systems and the production of high value bioproducts from Purple Phototrophic Bacteria.

One PhD position will be based at Wageningen University under the supervision of Prof. Annemiek ter Heijne, Dr. Tom Sleutels and Dr. Sanne de Smit focused on microbial electrochemistry. The second PhD position will be hosted at the University of Antwerp within SUSTAIN, supervised by Prof. Siegfried Vlaeminck and Dr. Luis Diaz Allegue, focused on purple biotechnology.

At Wageningen University, you will combine photobioreactors with electrochemical systems, and study the effect of process conditions on PPB growth and composition. You will carry out laboratory experiments and perform comprehensive analyses to address the research gaps related to bioelectrochemical PPB culturing.

The position is embedded in the chair group of Environmental Technology of Wageningen University, where (bio)electrochemical expertise and materials and analytical facilities are available. As part of this chair group, you will also be involved in support of teaching activities and training of MSc and BSc students.

You will work here
Environmental Technology (ETE) develops and evaluates innovative environmental technologies and concepts based on processes from nature, to recover and reuse essential components and maintain and create a viable environment. Our education inspires students to develop their talents. We impact by innovation through top science and focus on applicability. Environmental Technology offer education that is focused on sustainable technological solutions for the worldwide environmental problems. Our approach is to combine several disciplines in order to achieve innovations for environmental solutions.

See the vacancy at the University of Antwerp here.

Full Professor and Chair of Global Nutrition

(Re-opened vacancy)

Wageningen University & Research (WUR) invites applications for the position of Full Professor and Chair of Global Nutrition. The Global Nutrition chair group is embedded within the Division of Human Nutrition and Health, an internationally renowned centre for research and education in nutrition and health, comprising five highly regarded chair groups.

The incoming chair will provide strategic and academic leadership to a vibrant, internationally oriented research group with a strong societal mission.

The mission of the Global Nutrition group is to generate the evidence base needed to eradicate all forms of malnutrition while simultaneously improving planetary health. Across low-, middle-, and high-income contexts, the group advances nutritional insights to address healthy and sustainable diets worldwide. Research ranges from individual (mal)nutrition to population diets, and from pregnancy to old age. Core areas include maternal and child nutrition, public health nutrition, and sustainable food systems, with strong expertise in dietary assessment, nutritional epidemiology, and data science.

As Chair of Global Nutrition, you will have the opportunity to further shape and expand the group’s research agenda in alignment with its mission, while developing your own scientific vision and leadership profile. Your responsibilities include:

• Setting, steering and contributing to the strategic research direction of the chair group; including acquiring funding and leading research activities on Global Nutrition topics.
• providing academic leadership and supportive mentorship to a team of scientists, lecturers, and professional staff; diverse in backgrounds and career stages
• strengthening the group’s national and international visibility and impact;
• contributing to high-quality research and education in nutrition at BSc, MSc, and PhD levels, and driving innovation in teaching and research;
• jointly managing, together with four other chair holders and an operational manager, the daily operations of the Division of Human Nutrition and Health, including strategy, finances and operational-aspects of personnel and strategic management.

The Global Nutrition group currently consists of one chair holder, three part-time professors, four associate professors, two assistant professors, two teachers, one researcher, four postdoctoral researchers, research dietitians, project managers, secretarial staff, and approximately 40 PhD candidates, many of whom are based abroad in so-called “sandwich PhD” trajectories.

The group collaborates extensively within the nutrition cluster and across all Science Groups within WUR, and maintains strong international partnerships. More information can be found on the group’s website: Global Nutrition | WUR

The Division of Human Nutrition and Health comprises approximately 240 staff members (full-time and part-time), including 125 PhD candidates and 20 postdoctoral researchers, supported by a shared team of professionals such as research dietitians, technicians, nurses, a data steward, and administrative staff and more information is available at the website (Human Nutrition and Health | WUR). The Division includes five chair groups:

1. Global Nutrition
2. Nutritional Biology
3. Nutrition and Disease
4. Nutrition, Metabolism and Genomics
5. Sensory Science and Eating Behaviour

The Division integrates nutrition research across cellular, individual, and population levels, supported by state-of-the-art facilities including a dedicated human metabolic research unit, a research kitchen, advanced dietary assessment technologies, and modern analytical and in vitro laboratories.

Vacatures Postdoc socio-environmental data integration

Are you motivated by the critical yet complex challenge of developing a spatiotemporal data integration framework to support human action-taking in complex land systems? If yes, this postdoc position at Wageningen University is just right for you!

The Geo-information Science team within the Laboratory of Geo-information Science and Remote Sensing is an interdisciplinary research group focused on integrated approaches to geospatial systems analysis. Our work applies a complex adaptive systems approach that explicitly emphasizes behavioural models of human action-taking and decision-making. Relying on geo-information science as the foundation of our research endeavours, we employ participatory methods and integrate qualitative and quantitative information to analyse the dynamic interactions within complex land systems. The resulting knowledge informs the development of conceptual and simulation models to help further our understanding of land use and land cover changes in space and time. Our research centres on integrating local perspectives with regional and global contexts to gain a deeper understanding of human-environment interactions.
Understanding and shaping land systems is a challenging undertaking. Land systems emerge from complex interactions among human behaviour, environmental processes, and socio-economic drivers, all of which vary across spatial and temporal dimensions. Bringing together diverse data, information, and knowledge—collected from survey data, narrative accounts, and participatory insights to sensor measurements and high-resolution geospatial data—is an essential prerequisite for studying these complex interactions. Varying disciplinary perspectives, data formats, and spatiotemporal resolutions create significant challenges for data integration.

While Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) provide policies, standards, and technologies to host, manage, share, and regulate the use of geospatial data, they typically do not consider the integration of behavioural or human-centred data. These data necessitate stricter regulation for privacy protection, particularly when combined with location information or other sensitive data that could lead to the identification of individuals. They also pose challenges in contextualization, as human behaviour is often deeply influenced by cultural, social, and situational factors. Yet, behavioural and human-centred data are crucial to understanding complex land systems. Hence, we aim to expand the concept of SDIs to Socio-Environmental SDIs (or SE-SDIs).

We are seeking a postdoctoral researcher to develop an innovative SE-SDI that will serve as the foundation for addressing key challenges in complex land systems research. As a postdoctoral researcher, you will work on synthesizing multi-source, multi-modal data into a coherent data infrastructure and define the appropriate policies and standards for hosting, managing, and sharing the data typically used for analyses of complex adaptive land systems.

Your duties and responsibilities include:

• Develop a robust methodological framework for integrating heterogeneous datasets -including qualitative and quantitative data - across spatial and temporal dimensions,
• define and specify metadata standards and policies for documenting and sharing data,
• collaborate with group members to align the data infrastructure with broader research goals,
• apply and evaluate the developed SE-SDI framework using real-world case studies.

Remote Sensing (RS) wetenschapper

Wij zijn op zoek naar een Remote Sensing (RS) wetenschapper met passie voor milieu- en natuurmonitoring op verschillende schaalniveaus, met behulp van Artificial Intelligence (AI)-gestuurde Earth Observation (EO)-classificaties, in-situ data, EO-tijdreeksanalyse en kennisontwikkeling.

Voorbeelden van toepassingen zijn EO gestuurde habitat kartering, - modellering en - monitoring, zowel terrestrisch als marien, inclusief monitoring met behulp van drones. Je positioneert jouw toegepast onderzoek in een nationale én internationale context, in samenwerking met collega’s en (inter)nationale partners, vaak binnen multidisciplinaire teams die samen zoeken naar praktische oplossingen en innovaties.

Binnen onze groep zijn RS-wetenschappers, GIS experts en software engineers, teamspelers die vragen uit klantgerichte of wetenschappelijke projecten kunnen vertalen naar bruikbare inzichten op basis van data-gedreven technieken.

Je bent een teamgerichte professional die zich flexibel opstelt bij wisselende projectvereisten. Je hebt een resultaatgerichte en communicatieve instelling met goede kennis van RS, Geo-Informatie, GeoAI en ruimtelijke analyse. Expertise en affiniteit met één of meer van de volgende gebieden is noodzakelijk: optisch, multispectraal, hyperspectraal, LiDAR, radartechnologie en dronetechnologie.

Door diverse innovaties en ontwikkelingen in RS, technologie en institutionele contexten ontstaan voortdurend nieuwe toepassingsmogelijkheden. Het is jouw verantwoordelijkheid om dergelijke toepassingen te helpen ontwikkelen door gebruik te maken van de nieuwste inzichten uit ruimtelijke datawetenschap en AI-technologie, in combinatie met het verzamelen van in-situ informatie.

Jouw kernactiviteiten en verantwoordelijkheden zijn:

• Leiden en uitvoeren van onderzoeksprojecten binnen het vakgebied Remote Sensing.
• Toepassen van innovatieve RS- en GIS-technieken op basis van EO-data, milieudata en in-situ informatie om complexe wetenschappelijke en innovatievraagstukken op te lossen.
• Waarborgen van datakwaliteit door inzicht in in-situ dataverzameling en kwaliteitsaspecten van ruimtelijke data.
• Ontwikkelen van RS-oplossingen die zorgen voor continue beschikbaarheid van informatie in biodiversiteits-, milieu- en landbouwdomeinen.
• Creëren van nieuwe data-analysemethoden op basis van kunstmatige intelligentie en statistiek, en deze omzetten in krachtige tools voor toekomstig gebruik.
• Vertalen van klantvragen naar schaalbare data-gedreven oplossingen, in nauwe samenwerking met projectleiders, software engineers, AI-onderzoekers, GIS- en RS-specialisten.
• Coördineren van toegepaste onderzoeks- en datainnovatieprojecten met een sterke Remote Sensing-component.
• Actief volgen en integreren van nieuwe ontwikkelingen in ruimtelijke datawetenschap en data-engineering in je dagelijkse werk.
• Bijdragen aan acquisitie van nieuwe projecten door het signaleren van kansen en het ondersteunen bij het opstellen van voorstellen.

Binnen het grotere Team Earth Observation and Environmental Informatics, onderdeel van Wageningen Environmental Research, werk je intensief samen met 6 remote sensing-wetenschappers, terwijl je onderdeel bent van een bredere groep gespecialiseerd in geo-data, modelleringen en remote sensing.

Hier ga je werken
Wageningen Environmental Research is een kennisgedreven en onafhankelijk onderzoeksinstituut dat werkt aan de realisatie van een duurzame groene leefomgeving. Team Earth Observation and Environmental Informatics (afgekort Earth Informatics) is één van de onderzoeksteams van Wageningen Environmental Research (WENR) en onderdeel van Wageningen University & Research (WUR). In de snel ontwikkelende, interdisciplinaire vakgebieden van Earth Observation, Environmental Informatics en duurzame ontwikkeling ontwikkelen wij data-gedreven diensten voor een duurzamere wereld op verschillende schaalniveaus. Voorbeelden vind je op onze portfoliopagina: https://www.earthinformatics.eu/.

Senior Ecologist – Vegetation and Landscape Ecology

Are you an experienced ecologist with in-depth knowledge of Dutch flora, vegetation, and landscapes? Do you thrive on applied research and enjoy staying at the forefront of ecological science? Are you passionate about solving urgent environmental and societal challenges through vegetation science and landscape ecology? Then we’re looking for you!

About the Role
To strengthen our Vegetation and Landscape Ecology (VLE) team, we are seeking a senior researcher who brings:

• Up-to-date expertise in Dutch flora, vegetation types, and landscape ecology
• Familiarity with the latest scientific developments, both nationally and internationally

You will lead and contribute to applied research projects focused on nature conservation and restoration. Your work will inform a broad range of stakeholders—from EU, national, and regional policymakers to nature managers—helping shape decisions that impact ecosystems and biodiversity.
What You’ll Do

• Design and conduct research on monitoring, protecting, and restoring (semi-)natural systems, habitats, and endangered species
• Analyse ecological data, carry out policy-relevant studies, and translate findings into actionable insights
• Publish results in peer-reviewed journals and Dutch-language reports and articles
• Contribute to project acquisition and eventually lead new initiatives
• Mentor junior ecologists and foster a collaborative, team-oriented environment

Who You Are

• A senior ecologist with a strong academic and applied background
• Passionate about ecological restoration and policy impact
• Skilled in scientific writing and stakeholder communication

A proactive team player and mentor