PhD: Impact evaluation of climate policies in agricultural and forest landscapes

Have you ever wondered how we can ensure that climate mitigation and adaptation policies are fair, coherent, and effective? Are you interested in applying state-of-the-art impact evaluation techniques to analyze how climate policies affect land use, GHG emissions, and biodiversity? Do you good communication skills in Spanish? Then this might be your next step!

Climate change mitigation and adaptation in agriculture and forestry represent a “wicked problem”, shaped by uncertainty, conflicting objectives, institutional fragmentation and time pressure. While the EU has set ambitious climate targets for 2030 and climate neutrality by 2050, progress in agriculture and forestry remains insufficient and current policy frameworks have not yet resulted in significant climate mitigation and adaptation results, or generated the systemic transformation needed.

This PhD position is part of the EU-Horizon project “Evidence-based pathways towards fair, coherent and effective climate policies for Europe’s agriculture and forestry (PolicyForClimate)”, which will develop tools and frameworks to enable policymakers and other stakeholders to design fair, coherent, and effective climate mitigation and adaptation policies in the EU. The project will use AI-assisted evidence synthesis, a policy-lab approach, and embedded case studies to offer a continuously updated evidence base on policy impacts, trade-offs, synergies, and spillovers.

Your research will focus on developing, applying, and validating a novel mixed-methods framework for ex-post impact evaluation of climate policies in forestry and agricultural landscapes. By combining state-of-the-art econometric techniques with qualitative participatory approaches, you will empirically analyze how climate policies have affected land use, GHG emissions, and biodiversity metrics. This will require conducting systematic reviews on existing impact evaluation frameworks, run workshops and focus group discussions with various stakeholders, collect, combine, and analyze farm-level primary data and secondary spatially explicit data.

Start date: February 2027.

Your duties and responsibilities include:

• Conduct systematic literature reviews and workshops to develop a mixed-methods ex-post impact evaluation framework for climate policies;
• Apply rigorous econometric methods together with qualitative assessments, particularly from policy sciences, to evaluate the impact of specific climate policies on land cover, carbon, and biodiversity metrics;
• Conduct focus group discussions with various stakeholders in the EU to validate the proposed impact evaluation framework and results from the empirical analyses;
• Write research papers and present research findings at international academic conferences;
• Collaborate with our research partners and contribute to the dissemination of project results.

You will work here
You will be based at the Forest and Nature Conservation Policy Group (FNP) at Wageningen University. The FNP group focuses on the political, socio-economic and cultural dimensions of forests and nature. Our research addresses major challenges including biodiversity conservation, deforestation, forest transitions, climate change and landscape management in both the Global North and Global South. You will be jointly supervised by Dr. Jorge Sellare and Prof. Bas Arts from Wageningen University (WU-FNP), and by Dr. Dario Schulz (EFI) in the research group headed by Sven Wunder.

Docent klinisch onderwijs Pedagogische Wetenschappen

Je gaat werkgroeponderwijs geven aan groepen van ongeveer 25 studenten over onder andere Diagnostiek (diagnostische cyclus), Behandeling (onder andere cognitieve gedragstherapie), Communicatievaardigheden en/of Test- & Observatievaardigheden. Het gaat om cursussen waar klinische kennis wordt aangeboden en waar veel studenten meer over willen weten en waar ze voor het eerst gaan oefenen met klinische vaardigheden. Dat vinden ze vaak heel spannend, maar ook leuk! Als docent draag je de kennis over, stimuleer je het oefenen van vaardigheden en is er ruimte om je eigen ervaring als professional in te zetten. Studenten waarderen dit over het algemeen enorm!

Binnen je aanstelling krijg je opleidingstijd (ongeveer 100 uur per jaar, afhankelijk van de omvang van je aanstelling) om jezelf als docent te ontwikkelen (behalen van de Basis Kwalificatie Onderwijs, BKO), waarbij we voor de nodige begeleiding zorgen. Daarnaast krijg je een coach toegewezen waarbij je terecht kan met bijv didactische vragen. In overleg kun je eventueel ook andere taken gaan uitvoeren, zoals colleges geven, onderwijs mee ontwikkelen of het mede coördineren van een cursus.

De focus van de werkzaamheden ligt in eerste instantie op het verzorgen van werkgroeponderwijs. Naarmate het dienstverband langer duurt komen hier meer verantwoordelijke taken bij zoals het co-coördineren van een cursus, het geven van een of meerdere hoorcolleges en het (door)ontwikkelen van onderwijs en toetsing.

Je taken als docent klinisch onderwijs zijn:

• zelfstandig verzorgen van bachelorcursussen, met name in het klinisch onderwijs binnen het curriculum Pedagogische Wetenschappen;
• nakijken van opdrachten en tentamens;
• surveilleren en aanwezig zijn bij inzages;
• verzorgen van een of meerdere hoorcolleges;
• bijdrage leveren aan toets- en of onderwijsontwikkeling;
• co-coordinatie van een cursus.

Om je taken te kunnen uitvoeren zijn er docenthandleidingen beschikbaar en werk je in een docententeam waarin de lessen worden voor besproken en gezamenlijk voorbereid. Er is voldoende ruimte voor collegiaal overleg en intervisie.

PhD in Acoustic Performance of Timber Structure Connections

Buildings made from timber and other biobased materials generally have a significantly lower carbon footprint than conventional concrete or masonry constructions. However, lightweight timber structures often exhibit high variability in sound insulation, and poor acoustic performance remains a barrier to their wider adoption in the construction industry.

A still poorly understood source of this variability lies in the connections between structural components, such as screws, nails, steel brackets, and adhesive joints. Whether a floor is screwed or glued together, and how widely spaced the fasteners are, can significantly affect how sound travels through a building. Current prediction methods largely ignore these details, while more detailed models are often too computationally expensive for practical use. Developing methods that are both physically accurate and computationally efficient is therefore the central challenge of this project.

We offer a PhD position (4-year contract) within the QUIET-ARC project, a collaboration between Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) as part of the EuroTech Universities PhD programme.

As a PhD candidate in the QUIET-ARC project, you will investigate how different connection types and layouts influence sound transmission in timber buildings, develop efficient numerical simulation methods to model these effects, and quantify the uncertainty introduced by construction variability into acoustic predictions.

Noise is recognised by the World Health Organisation as a major public health concern. By improving the predictive capability of computational models for timber buildings, this research supports more reliable prediction tools for sustainable constructions and contributes to the wider adoption of low-carbon building materials.

The project will take place under joint supervision of dr.ir. Cédric Van hoorickx (TU/e, specializing in numerical modelling of sound transmission) and dr.ir. Jonas Brunskog (DTU, with expertise in the acoustics of lightweight structures). You will be based in the Building Acoustics research group (https://building-acoustics.net/) in the Department of the Built Environment at TU/e, and will spend approximately six months at DTU’s Acoustic Technology group in Denmark.

Marketing Operations Marketeer

In this role, you will help turn audience needs and commercial priorities into relevant CRM communications and customer journeys for Executive Education.

You will work closely with the Marketing Operations Manager and commercial teams to set up, maintain and optimise email campaigns, lead nurturing and automated flows for different programmes and audiences. You will report directly to the Manager of the Shared Service Centre for marketing.

You will use campaign results to improve targeting, timing and content, while helping to create a consistent approach to CRM across Executive Education. Your work will help us engage professionals more effectively throughout their journey with RSM and connect them with learning opportunities that are relevant to their ambitions and development. You will also help bring our CRM marketing activities to life, from targeted email campaigns and customer journeys to lead nurturing and optimisation.

Specifically, this means:

• Support the set-up and execution of CRM campaigns, email communications and marketing automation flows.
• Create and adapt content for newsletters, email campaigns, nurturing activities and other CRM communications.
• Set up targeted and segmented communications based on programme, audience, interests or stage in the customer journey.
• Help maintain and update existing automated workflows and campaigns.
• Work with commercial teams to understand the needs of different target audiences and translate these into relevant CRM communications.
• Ensure CRM activities are implemented consistently across Executive Education programmes and follow agreed processes and guidelines.
• Track CRM and campaign activities and report on basic performance results, such as opens, clicks, registrations and engagement.
• Support the Marketing Operations Manager in analysing campaign results and identifying opportunities for improvement.
• Test and optimise CRM communications, for example content, timing, targeting and frequency.
• Contribute ideas for new CRM campaigns, nurturing activities and ways to improve the customer journey.
• Support the maintenance of CRM data and mailing lists to ensure communications can be targeted effectively.
• Support the ongoing maintenance of CRM data quality by reviewing and cleaning, helping to keep the database accurate, complete and up to date.
• Stay up to date with relevant CRM and marketing automation functionalities and apply these in day-to-day marketing activities.