Management and Office Assistent

As an Education support team, we support the more than 800 students in our Bachelor's and Master's programmes in Animal Sciences. As a Management/Office assistant, you manage the general e-mail box and support the team consisting of one Programme Director and five Study Advisors in their tasks. You will also actively contribute to making processes run as smoothly as possible for everyone involved, such as lecturers, prospective students and other WUR colleagues.

Your work as a Management/Office assistant is:

• Supporting educational processes. You will support various educational tasks, such as providing administrative support for the skills track in the bachelor's programme, preparing diploma ceremonies and taking minutes at educational consultations;
• Calendar management. You partly manage the agendas of the programme director and study advisors, both via Outlook and the online appointment system for students;
• Taking minutes at meetings. You prepare meetings (such as the Programme Committee) and make clear and structured minutes;
• First point of contact for staff and students. You answer questions by phone or e-mail and offer support with practical matters such as leave, absenteeism, orders, declarations and other arrangements;
• Room reservations and organization of meetings. You book teaching and meeting rooms and help organize graduation ceremonies and meetings, for example.

Working as a management/office assistant at Wageningen University & Research
Your new colleagues welcome you to Wageningen University & Research (WUR). The collaboration with colleagues in an informal environment is greatly appreciated by management/office assistants within WUR. This, in combination with a lot of self-direction, independence and the possibility of hybrid working, means that the work-life balance can also count on a lot of appreciation.

Add to that a challenging international environment where, on our beautiful green campus, we work daily on themes with a major social impact.

Education
Part of Education & Student Affairs is the "Education" section, consisting of 20 programme directors and their education teams (study advisors, spokespersons and secretariats). Within the Animal Sciences Educational team, the programme director is your manager.

Senior life cycle assessment (LCA) researcher and project manager

Are you an experienced LCA researcher with a track record in supporting public and private clients in the agricultural and food sector in sustainability measurement and LCA? Would you like to support businesses, policymakers and NGOs in measuring environmental impacts of (agri-food) products, and designing pathways to reduce those?

We are looking for an experienced colleague with a market- and customer-oriented attitude and a great affinity with applied scientific research. A track record in executing life cycle assessments is a must. You should have excellent project management skills in that field.

Your most important activities in this position will be:

• Developing, improving and harmonising LCA methods, databases and tools to measure environmental impacts in projects in which clients are supported with recommendations on how to best improve their sustainability achievements;
• Leading and working in project teams that vary in size and complexity. These may vary from about five colleagues at Wageningen Social & Economic Research to larger teams consisting of researchers from different organisations and subcontractors. These could be from WUR divisions, such as Wageningen Plant or Livestock Research, but also international consortia;
• Maintaining regular contact with your clients, whereby you proactively manage the relation to ensure that recommendations are relevant and actionable, whilst being evidence-based. Clients include private and public sector parties as well as NGOs;
• Leading the acquisition of new applied research projects based on your active network in agricultural development and sustainable value chains settings.

In this position you can really have an impact on making food chains more sustainable by working together with high level decision makers from the public and private sectors and leading multi-stakeholder groups to develop and implementing European or global sustainability standards. You will be working in the expertise group Sustainable Value Chains, one of twelve expertise groups at Wageningen Social & Economic Research. The Sustainable Value Chains group is committed to contributing to more sustainable value chains by doing applied socio-economic research for food businesses, governments and NGOs. For example, the group works together with public and private sector on developing a harmonized standard to put an environmental score on every food product in Europe. The group consists of a multidisciplinary and multinational team of value chain and (environmental, and social) sustainability experts. The group is specialised not only in LCA, but also in true cost accounting, developing new and fair business models and markets, and research on various agricultural value chains (e.g. livestock, horticulture and floriculture).

PhD position in Modelling food supply chains for Shelf life Control, Optimized Pricing, and Excess Redistribution

Are you committed to reducing food waste? Are you interested in how coordination, dynamic pricing and redistribution may affect food waste? Do you have a passion for applying optimization and simulation techniques to reduce food waste and make food supply chains more sustainable? If your answer is “Yes!” to these questions, then this PhD position might be the perfect opportunity for you!

We are inviting applications for a 4-year full-time PhD position as part of the SCOPE project—Shelf-life Control, Optimized Pricing, and Excess Redistribution—a collaboration between the Operations Research and Logistics group at Wageningen University, the Zero Hunger Lab at Tilburg University, and four industry partners.

In this project, you will develop and advance optimization models and algorithms to support decision-making in food supply chains, with the overarching goal of reducing food waste.
Key research questions include:

1. Coordination: How can the flow of goods in food supply chains be better coordinated —e.g., through shelf-life agreements or optimized production and (re)distribution planning—to proactively reduce waste?
2. Dynamic Pricing: How can dynamic pricing be used to prevent excess inventory of perishable products from turning into waste?
3. Redistribution: How can surplus food be effectively donated to food banks to avoid waste?

Your contribution and responsibilities include:

• To develop mathematical optimization models and algorithms to address the above questions. Given the uncertainties involved in food supply chains, we prefer candidates who have a background in (stochastic) optimization methods (e.g., machine learning, stochastic dynamic programming, simulation). Affinity with (food) supply chain management is preferred.
• To collaborate with and to co-supervise MSc thesis students and internship students employed at the partner companies involved, and support teaching as needed (in consultation with supervisors).
• To write four scientific papers and get them published in ISI ranked Q1 journals.

You will work here
The research project is a collaboration between the Operations Research and Logistics Group (ORL) at Wageningen University (WU) and the Zero Hunger Lab (ZHL) at Tilburg University (TiU). You will be appointed at WU-ORL, which is led by Prof. Dr. ir. Sander de Leeuw. You will be supervised by Dr. Rene Haijema from WU and Dr. Yasemin Merzifonluoglu from TiU.

Onderzoeksassistent Productkwaliteit

Als Onderzoeksassistent Productkwaliteit ben je betrokken bij ons sensorisch panelonderzoek aan versproducten zoals tomaat, aardbei, komkommer en andere gewassen. Dit betreft afnemen van basissmaaktesten en experttesten, uitnodigen van panelleden, voorbereiden van smaaktesten in EyeQuestion en EyeContact, de ondersteuning van paneltrainingen, bijhouden van databestanden voor de uitbetaling van panelleden, en voorbereiden en begeleiden van panelavonden. Daarnaast doen we houdbaarheidstesten waarbij we de kwaliteit van versproducten evalueren tijdens het bewaren ervan.

Jouw taken en verantwoordelijkheden als Onderzoeksassistent Productkwaliteit zijn:

• Organiseren en uitvoeren van basissmaaktesten en experttesten met een smaakpanel;
• ondersteunen van paneltrainingen;
• organiseren en uitvoeren van houdbaarheidstesten voor versproducten;
• uitvoeren kwaliteitsmetingen;
• uitvoeren metingen in andere laboratoria en kasexperimenten indien nodig.

Jouw team
Jij gaat samenwerken met andere collega’s (onderzoekers en onderzoeksassistenten) van de groep Productkwaliteit in het uitvoeren van sensorische smaaktesten en houdbaarheidsonderzoek. Je werkt intensief samen met veredelingsbedrijven en telers die hun producten door panels laten testen. De groep is onderdeel van het team Gewasfysiologie en Productkwaliteit met ongeveer 20 medewerkers. We onderzoeken verschillende aspecten van de productie en kwaliteit van kasgewassen.

Hier ga je werken
Wageningen University & Research, Business Unit Glastuinbouw is het internationaal leidende instituut voor contractonderzoek voor de glastuinbouw. We focussen ons op innovaties. Samen met partners uit de industrie, de wetenschap en de overheid analyseren we vragen op het gebied van kasontwerp, gewasmanagement en teelt en vertalen dit in toegepast onderzoek en innovatie. De Business Unit Glastuinbouw heeft ongeveer 160 medewerkers en zeven onderzoeksgroepen:

• Greenhouse technology
• Greenhouse automation and Robotics
• Crop health
• Physiology and product quality
• Root zone dynamics
• Crop management and cultivation
• Greenhouse facilities horticulture

PhD position: Effectiveness of freshwater wetlands as climate buffers for biodiversity gain and ecosystem services

Are you interested in studying the effectiveness of freshwater wetlands as climate buffers for biodiversity gain and ecosystem services and do you have the necessary analytic skills?

We are looking for a motivated PhD candidate to join our research team on wetland and wildlife ecology with a focus on understanding how effectively climate buffers in the form of freshwater wetlands, are as a nature-based solution, for climate change adaptation, biodiversity gain, and other ecosystem services to people.

Key responsibilities:

• Analyse biodiversity data of birds, plants and insects from newly created freshwater wetlands in The Netherlands to investigate their contribution to biodiversity recovery in relation to their specific properties; collect additional biodiversity data where necessary;
• Conduct research to determine the ecosystem services that these freshwater wetlands are providing, from a diversity of resources, including databases, administrative documents, satellite imagery, interviews with stakeholders and field measurements where necessary;
• Integrate empirical data analysis including ecological, sociological and economic parameters into a synthesis of the effectiveness of freshwater wetlands as climate buffers to provide biodiversity recovery and ecosystem services; conceptualize these as ecosystems of the future and investigate the opportunities and constraints on scaling up the application of freshwater wetlands as climate buffers elsewhere at the national and international level;
• Publish research findings in peer-reviewed journals and present them at national and international conferences;
• Mentor BSc/MSc students.

About NL2120
NL2120 is a program in which science, business, nature organizations and education work together to gain knowledge about natural solutions (Nature-based Solutions) and about how to scale them up. The ambition of NL2120 is to stimulate the use nature (Nature Based Solutions) as a solution for social challenges, such as climate adaptation and multiple claims on scarce land.

As one of the largest public-private partnerships in the field of Nature-based Solutions in the world, NL2120 works on gathering and scaling up knowledge, connecting theory and practice and drawing up feasible future perspectives. So that organizations, including governments, water boards, provinces, (construction) companies and ultimately also individual citizens, know how they can put nature-based solutions into practice.

We analyse and answer questions from different perspectives:

• Physical-ecological: How effective are Nature-based Solutions and how can they be applied in a changing climate?
• Socio-economic: What are the costs and benefits of (large infrastructural) Nature-based Solutions for society and broad prosperity?
• Institutional: How do we ensure good cooperation between sectors and integration in regulations when applying Nature-based Solutions?