Machine Learning/AI Researcher and Project Leader

Are you an experienced machine learning and data science professional who wants to make a real-world impact? Do you have a specialisation in machine learning and affinity with project management? Do you want to apply advanced AI solutions to contribute to a more sustainable and better world? We, Wageningen Food & Biobased Research (WFBR), are looking for a researcher data & modelling. Are you the one who will strengthen our team?

What will you do?
As a machine learning researcher, you will initiate and work on innovative data-driven solutions in the bioeconomy and food domains. One example is improving fermentation screening for plant‑based ingredients, a process that is traditionally slow because each substrate–strain combination behaves differently. By applying machine learning to historical experimental data, we can predict high‑potential combinations that support the creation of innovative and sustainable food products. Another example is using large language model (LLM) tools to automatically extract and structure fragmented information from internal and external sources for use in our digital solutions.

Your duties and responsibilities include:

• initiation of new projects / ideas for acquisition by shaping new applied research propositions and supplying the insights needed to convey the value of AI solutions to partners & clients;
• leading projects in which you and your team design and develop new AI solutions. Off course translating research questions into robust machine learning implementations, including preprocessing, model training, validation and deployment is part of your role;
• collaborating enthusiastically with domain specialists and software developers to integrate data‑driven models with mechanistic or physics‑based models and domain expertise;
• showing thought leadership on applying data & AI-solutions in the food & biobased domain: where are the big leaps, how can we actively bring the benefits of data & AI to our customers in this domain?

Your team
You will work as an expert within the expertise group Wageningen Food & Biobased Research. Together with the adjoining expertise Computer Vision it comprises about 16 diverse specialists ranging from software development to AI/ML research. At DSI, our mission is to unlock the full potential of data and AI to help transform food and biobased systems into sustainable, resilient and innovative sectors — through science, collaboration and real‑world application.

Our projects require close interaction with WFBR domain specialists, with whom you will play a key role in translating state‑of‑the‑art digital techniques into models that meet their scientific and operational needs.

You will work here
WFBR operates at the intersection of science, industry and government, delivering applied research and innovation projects funded by both public and private partners. You will be part of a multidisciplinary environment within WFBR, working closely with experts in food technology, microbiology and chemistry. Knowledge sharing is central to how we work: we meet several times a week in Wageningen to exchange ideas, review project progress, and continuously improve our approaches. You will collaborate with business developers, researchers, software developers and clients. You will contribute to impactful applied research in the domains of food and biobased materials.

Student-Assistent ondersteuning archief Nederlands Tweelingen Register

Als student-assistent ondersteun je het Nederlands Tweelingen Register, onderdeel van de afdeling Biologische Psychologie, bij verschillende praktische werkzaamheden rondom onderzoeksdocumentatie en administratie. Je werkzaamheden bestaan voornamelijk uit het uitzoeken en digitaliseren van documenten.

Jouw taken

• Uitzoeken van bestaande onderzoeks- en administratieve documentatie;
• Scannen en digitaliseren van documenten;
• Ordenen en controleren van digitale bestanden;
• Andere voorkomende ondersteunende werkzaamheden binnen de afdeling.

Postdoc Position in AI Foundation Models for Crop Microbiomes

Plant-associated microbiomes can strongly influence crop growth, nutrition and resilience, but their behaviour depends on the crop, soil, environment and the surrounding microbial community. NOAH aims to make these context-dependent interactions learnable and predictable. At the centre of the project is ARCA (AI-guided Root microbiome engineering for ClimAte-resilient and nutritious crops), a crop microbiome foundation model trained on large-scale public and newly generated datasets.

As Postdoctoral Researcher in AI, you will take a leading technical role in developing ARCA. You will explore which model architectures and learning objectives work best for sparse, high-dimensional and heterogeneous microbiome data, and turn the selected approaches into robust trainable models. Your work will cover both foundation-model pretraining and downstream predictive and generative applications.

Your main responsibilities are to:

• design, implement and benchmark foundation-model architectures for microbiome data, including transformer-based and masked-autoencoder approaches and relevant architectures adapted from related biological domains;
• develop representations that integrate microbial identity and abundance with genomic or functional information and contextual metadata such as crop genotype, soil and environmental conditions;
• define and evaluate self-supervised learning objectives and embedding strategies, and benchmark their added value against simpler machine-learning baselines;
• train and evaluate ARCA on large-scale microbiome datasets, with attention to sparsity, batch effects, scalability, generalisation across studies and uncertainty in downstream predictions;
• fine-tune ARCA for tasks including microbial root competence and crop-relevant outcomes, and iteratively improve the model using experimental Design-Build-Test-Learn data generated by NOAH partners;
• develop a generative ARCA component, exploring autoencoder- and/or diffusion-based approaches for generating ecologically plausible microbiome configurations;
• apply interpretable and explainable AI approaches to identify microbial taxa, functions and contextual features driving model predictions;
• develop reproducible training and evaluation workflows and work with project partners to make models and associated tools usable beyond the immediate research setting.

You will not work on an isolated AI benchmark. ARCA predictions will be tested experimentally in greenhouse and field settings and the resulting microbiome and crop phenotype data will feed back into model development. This gives you the opportunity to develop new AI methodology while seeing how model predictions perform in a real biological and agricultural system.

In this position you will part of an interdisciplinary research environment spanning the AI Technology for Life and Plant-Microbe Interactions groups, with close interaction with bioinformatics, microbial ecology and experimental crop research at the UU and NOAH partners. You will have access to Utrecht University GPU/HPC infrastructure and large, curated microbiome and microbial genome datasets. Additionally, you will collaborate closely with NOAH partners at Aarhus University, Niab, INRAE and The Hyve, including experimental teams that will directly test model predictions.

Docent (bio)statistiek en/of data science

Als onderwijsteam zijn wij verantwoordelijk voor de volledige verzorging van onze cursussen: voorbereiden, geven en toetsen van bestaand onderwijs, alsook vernieuwing en ontwikkeling. Ons onderwijs is veelal een mix van hoorcolleges, kennisclips, werkcolleges en computerpractica. De cursussen worden face-to-face of geheel online aangeboden. In al ons onderwijs sluiten we zo veel mogelijk aan bij de huidige onderwijskundige denkbeelden over het academische biostatistiek onderwijs.

Om onze kennis up-to-date te houden en ons onderwijs te voeden met voorbeelden uit de praktijk, werken wij als biostatisticus mee aan onderzoeksprojecten. Dit kunnen projecten zijn die worden uitgevoerd binnen het UMCU, alsmede projecten van externe opdrachtgevers. Onze bijdrage is erg divers, zoals een eenmalig advies, een volledige analyse van de data of het meeschrijven aan een onderzoeksprotocol of wetenschappelijk artikel.

Je gaat als docent aan de slag in ons team. Je wordt ingezet bij bestaande cursussen en bij de ontwikkeling van nieuw materiaal. Welke verantwoordelijkheden je krijgt, hangt mede af van je kennis, ervaring en interesses. De werkzaamheden zijn divers: van het (door)ontwikkelen van cursusmateriaal tot het geven van een hoorcollege of het maken van toetsvragen. Daarnaast werk je mee aan projecten waarbij je jouw statistische expertise inzet en verder uitbreidt. Je werkzaamheden zijn voor 90% gerelateerd aan onderwijs en voor 10% gerelateerd aan projecten.

PhD position on linguistic effects of child language brokering in multilingual families

About the position
Children from immigrant families often translate and mediate for others (typically their parents), a phenomenon called “child language brokering”. Brokering occurs in a variety of contexts: at home, at schools, and in medical offices. Research shows that child language brokering may have positive and negative effects on children’s socio-emotional development and on child-parent relationships, depending on when and where brokering occurs. There are also some indications that brokering affects children’s and parents’ development of the first and second language, but these effects remain largely unexplored.

In this PhD project, you will investigate how brokering experiences affect the maintenance of the heritage language and development of the second language in child brokers and their parents. The project is part of an NWO-funded project, consisting of two PhD students and a team of supervisors. The other PhD project focuses on the socio-emotional effects of brokering.

You will conduct a series of studies to investigate the effects of child brokering on the maintenance of the heritage language and development of the second language across more informal (home) and more formal (school, health care) contexts. You will also investigate what linguistic strategies are used during brokering, what beliefs brokers and parents hold about these strategies, and what opportunities for language learning emerge during brokering episodes. You will use a variety of methods, including observations, semi-structured interviews, controlled language tasks, as well as advanced statistics (network analysis). Together, the studies you will conduct will inform us about when and how brokering has positive effects on the use, maintenance and development of the heritage language and the second language in both child brokers and their parents.

This is what you will be doing
You will perform the following tasks and activities:

• reviewing literature on the effects of language brokering on the heritage and second language;
• carrying out in-depth studies to investigate the effects of child brokering on language development, as well as the linguistic strategies used during brokering and the opportunities to learn language during brokering;
• collaborating in an interdisciplinary research team;
• committing to open science practices such as pre-registering studies;
• contributing to knowledge utilization (outreach) activities undertaken by the team;
• submission of a PhD thesis within the period of appointment;
• presenting intermediate research results at workshops and conferences;
• participating in the Research School and Faculty of Humanities PhD training programmes;
• co-teaching courses at BA-level in the second and third year of the appointment (maximum 0,2 fte per year).

This is what we ask of you

• a completed Master's degree in Linguistics, Education, Psychology or a related field;
• excellent research skills demonstrated by a Master thesis;
• solid knowledge of quantitative and/or qualitative research methods;
• strong communicative and organizational skills, a cooperative attitude and commitment to team science;
• enthusiasm for communicating academic research to non-academic audiences;
• enthusiasm for teaching;
• participation in the ACLC and the national research school training program;
• excellent proficiency in English for academic purposes;
• (near-)native command in Dutch (C1-level or higher, or native) and working proficiency in a widely spoken heritage language (e.g., Arabic, Turkish, Polish) OR vice versa.

Please note that if you already hold a doctorate/PhD or are working towards obtaining a similar degree elsewhere, you will not be admitted to a doctoral programme at the UvA.

This is what else we offer you

• We offer a temporary employment contract for the period of 48 months. The first contract will be for 16 months, with an extension for the following 32 months, contingent on a positive performance evaluation within the first 12 months. The preferred starting date is 01 February 2027;
• Based on a full-time appointment (38 hours per week) the gross monthly salary will range from €3.204 in the first year to €4.051 (scale P) in the last year. This does not include 8% holiday allowance and 8,3% year-end allowance. The UFO profile PhD candidate applicable. The Collective Labour Agreement of Universities of the Netherlands is applicable;
• Excellent possibilities for further professional development and education;
• Excellent support research facilities (such as the Speech Lab);
• PhD candidates have free access to courses offered by the Graduate School of Humanities and the Dutch National Research Schools

This is where you will be working
You will be appointed at the Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication (ACLC) as part of the project “Small voices, big words: Effects of child language brokering in immigrant families”, led by dr. Josje Verhagen and funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

This project consists of two interconnected PhD projects: one looks at the effects of child language brokering on socio-emotional outcomes and the other at linguistic outcomes. Each PhD will have their own supervision team consisting of specialized members of staff (dr. Josje Verhagen and prof. dr. Sible Andringa for the present project). You will meet regularly within these teams as well as in the larger project team.

The Amsterdam Centre for Language and Communication is one of the five Research Schools within the Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research. Within the University of Amsterdam, the ACLC represents a thriving linguistics community, home to several research groups that you can join. The current project falls under the Language Learning, Literacy and Multilingualism research group. The ACLC also has an active PhD community that meets formally and informally.