EngD Position on Reference Architecture for Interoperable and Federated Digital Building Permitting

The construction sector is undergoing rapid digital transformation, with increasing adoption of data-driven methods to improve the efficiency, transparency, and sustainability of building design and permitting processes. Despite this progress, regulatory compliance and permitting workflows remain highly fragmented across municipalities and stakeholders, often relying on manual coordination and heterogeneous digital systems. This limits scalability, slows down approval processes, and constrains the adoption of industrialised and sustainable construction approaches.

Within the OIVA (Open Innovation for Verified Automation) project at the University of Twente, we offer an EngD position focused on the design of architectural and interoperability concepts for next-generation digital building permitting ecosystems. The envisioned context is a distributed and federated digital permitting system, where compliance checks are not executed centrally but performed by multiple specialised and independent solution providers.

This EngD project focuses on how architectural principles, interoperability frameworks, and semantic approaches can support consistent and reliable information exchange across a multi-actor ecosystem. Rather than defining how compliance checks are implemented, the work emphasizes how information should be structured, shared, and interpreted to enable diverse compliance mechanisms across independent providers.

Key attention areas include the design of reference architectures for distributed digital ecosystems, supporting modularity, scalability, and extensibility over time. This includes exploring how structured data requirements for permitting workflows can be consistently defined with an ontology and aligned with existing standards and regulatory frameworks, as well as how different actors in the ecosystem can reliably exchange and interpret information. Additional focus is placed on cross-organisational interaction and workflow coordination within the permitting process, including how submissions are routed, how results from multiple service providers are aggregated, and how consolidated outputs can support decision-making by authorities.

The EngD trainee will work on designing and evaluating architectural concepts and frameworks that support interoperable, secure, and scalable digital permitting ecosystems. The work will be carried out in close collaboration with the Municipality of Eindhoven and industrial partners, and will draw on expertise in enterprise architecture, information systems design, interoperability, and digital governance. The outcome will contribute to reusable architectural building blocks that can support the development of distributed digital permitting ecosystems in national and European contexts.

Assistant Professor for the Psychology of Conflict, Risk, and Safety Section

We are seeking an Assistant Professor to strengthen the Psychology of Conflict, Risk and Safety section at the University of Twente. The position focuses on understanding how people perceive, experience, and respond to threats to psychological, physical, societal, and environmental safety. These include a wide range of contemporary challenges such as crisis situations, (cyber)crime, risk communication, restorative justice, and sustainability-related issues including climate change and societal transitions. The successful candidate will contribute to an interdisciplinary and impact-oriented research agenda aimed at addressing safety and resilience challenges, using evidence-based, and where relevant technology-supported, approaches that strengthen resilience and promote safer and more sustainable societies. The role combines research and teaching within our Bachelor’s and Master’s programmes in Psychology, as well as the Master’s programme in Risk Management, with a strong emphasis on connecting scientific insight to societal relevance and real-world impact.

Researcher in methods and statistics, specializing in programming and structural equation modelling

The opening

We are seeking a highly motivated junior (e.g., postdoctoral) researcher to develop and implement an automated, transparent framework for testing, validating, and documenting the lavaan package.

As part of Work Package 2 (Modernize lavaan’s accountability infrastructure) of the “Infra-Structural Equation Modelling: Sustainably Scaling an Indispensable Open-Source Theory-Testing Infrastructure” project, you will become a member of the lavaan core team to implement modern software best practices into the core package. This will involve collaborating with other core team members and writing comprehensive unit tests to automatically validate user-facing "visible" outputs as well as "invisible" underlying background calculations. You will also design a validation testing database to cross-verify lavaan's estimation outcomes against those of alternative commercial and open-source statistical software. Additionally, you will exhaustively document existing and new features, and build an accessible, public-facing documentation website.

In this role, you will be based at the University of Twente under the supervision of Dr. F. (Florian) Schuberth, collaborating closely with core lavaan authors, SEM experts and the broader inter-university project development team.

Focus
In this role, you will become a member of the core lavaan development team:

• Develop and implement automated, transparent quality tests for both low-level and high-level functions of the lavaan packages in order to ensure the validity of the reported results.
• Systematically document existing and newly developed codebase features.
• Opportunity to co-author a “sequel” to Rosseel’s (2012) frequently cited paper in the Journal of Statistical Software, which introduced an early version of lavaan.
• Author comprehensive package vignettes (potentially publishable as tutorials in academic journals) to be included in the lavaan package or automatically deployed on the lavaan website.
• Contribute to defining and publishing transparent coding and testing standards, to guide future community contributors and extension developers, and co-author a “call-to-action” tutorial paper targeted for Structural Equation Modeling: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

PhD position in the Department of Molecules and Materials on the Development of In-situ Optical Sensing for Polymer-based Op...

You are a highly motivated researcher with a Master’s degree in Physical Chemistry or Physics, with skills in optics and spectroscopies. You have strong communication skills and enjoy collaborating with partners across different disciplines of physics, chemistry, materials, and computer science. Join us in developing optical sensing techniques to reveal how charge, structure, and chemistry evolve in conductive and functional polymer materials during operation, with the goal of enabling energy-efficient organic-based optoelectronics. Polymers are emerging materials for optoelectronics, molecular memory, neuromorphic devices, and chemical sensing, but many of the key chemical and physical processes that control their stability and performance remain difficult to observe during operation, hindering their high-value high-tech applications. Join a cutting-edge research project at the University of Twente and help revolutionize polymers for multifunctional optoelectronics!

As a PhD student, you will work on the project focused on developing in-situ optical sensing for polymer-based electronics: using light to non-invasively inspect, understand, and improve their stability and performance, with the aim to develop energy-efficient optoelectronic devices. You’ll select and design conductive polymers, fabricate electronics devices, then build in-situ UV-Vis/Raman/surface enhanced Raman spectroscopies platform to reveal hidden processes such as interfacial charge transfer, redox switching, doping and dedoping, morphology dynamics, and local electric field effects. You’ll model electrical and optical inputs and responses for energy-efficient computing as a proof of concept.

Admission Officer

Binnen de afdeling Student Affairs & Services (SAS) stroomlijnen we vanuit onze front- en backoffice de processen rondom aanmeldingen, inschrijvingen, visum aanvragen en huisvesting van (aankomende) bachelor-, master- en uitwisselingsstudenten.

In deze functie ben jij samen met jouw collega’s verantwoordelijk voor de diplomawaardering en verificatie van de authenticiteit van diploma’s voor toelating tot een opleiding van de Universiteit Twente. Je begeleidt de student door het gehele aanmeldingstraject en zorgt ervoor dat de student tijdig geïnformeerd wordt over zijn of haar toelaatbaarheid.

Je beslist over de toelaatbaarheid van de aankomende bachelor student en brengt over de aankomende master student advies uit aan de opleidingen. Ook uitwisselingsstudenten begeleid je in het administratieve aanmeld- en registratieproces, zodat zij kunnen starten aan hun uitwisselingsprogramma aan de Universiteit Twente. Je levert een bijdrage aan de uitvoering van het UT-toelatingsbeleid voor (internationale) studenten en je vertaalt de algemene UT-toelatingseisen naar eisen voor studenten met een internationale vooropleiding. Samen met je collega’s ben je verantwoordelijk voor het bijhouden van nationale en internationale ontwikkelingen op het gebied van onderwijssystemen, diplomawaardering en communicatie hierover binnen en buiten de UT. Ook ben je verantwoordelijk voor de ontwikkeling, beschrijving en het onderhoud van de aanmeldprocessen en zorg je ervoor dat jullie werkinstructies actueel zijn. Op verzoek lever je analyses en informatie aan het management aan.