Assistant/Associate Professor in Mathematical Statistics or Statistical Learning

We invite interested candidates to explore whether Twente is a potential match, via the website of the Department of Applied Mathematics (DAMUT) and the website of the Statistics group!

As an Assistant/Associate Professor:

• You develop your own identity as a mathematician;
• You will be involved in the teaching program of the Department of Applied Mathematics (DAMUT) at the Bachelor and Master level, and our department also supplies service teaching to other programmes and faculties;
• Young staff members spend the first three years of their employment 33% on teaching and 67% research; later, the standard division is 50/50;
• During the first three years, you will acquire the University Teaching Qualification (UTQ).

PhD position ‘trust-building strategies in societal crisis dynamics’

As a crisis unfolds, tensions in society can quickly increase, escalating into stronger positioning, heated public debate, and physical frictions. As such, societies are likely to be confronted with social conflict encounters, varying from ‘playful’ activities (e.g., ‘souping’ pieces of art) to grim protest demonstrations or riots.

Trust and the perceived legitimacy of institutions play a key role in the dynamics of crisis conflict: waning trust in the parties handling the crisis is usually a driving force, and trust-building strategies in such crisis situations are key to resolving the incidents peacefully and restoring civic trust, social cohesion, and perceptions of institutional integrity. However, the latter is difficult to accomplish. Professional interventions from authority figures at the scene (e.g., the police) tend to escalate rather than de-escalate conflicts, particularly when such dynamics unfold in the public domain: media coverage and online amplification of perceived trust violations often serve as pressure tactics, intensifying conflict. As these dynamics are witnessed by an audience of traditional and social media, as well as side-taking and neutral publics, they may fuel further escalation and profoundly shape public perceptions. Understanding and influencing these dynamics requires attention to both relational trust and narrative authority. A key question of this PhD project is how such escalatory processes can be turned.

Activities are:

• Integrating the literature from different research lines, notably the role of trust violations in radicalisation processes, research on influence and repair strategies of frontline professionals (e.g., religious leaders, healthcare workers, and police (hostage) negotiators), and the emerging field of group polarisation and protest movements.
• Developing an overarching conceptual framework for trust-building strategies in escalated and mediatized crisis dynamics.
• Calibrating the framework developed with recordings of such interactions and interviews with key stakeholders.
• Testing the effectiveness in field studies, with attention to situational and cultural adaptivity, and the interaction between online and offline dynamics and public perception

The PhD will be based in the research group Psychology of Conflict, Risk and Safety and offers a 4-year fulltime PhD position focusing on trust-building interventions in societal crisis dynamics.

PhD Candidate Geospatial Risk Modelling for Climate Finance

The University of Twente wishes to increase the number of women in the faculty to have a more balanced staff profile. Therefore, we will prioritise selecting women who fit this profile during all phases of the selection process.

Your tasks
Effectively understanding and mitigating financial risks associated with climate change is important for sustainable economic decision-making. Climate finance is critical in addressing physical risks by quantifying economic losses from climate-related disasters and developing financial instruments that enhance market resilience. As global financial markets increasingly recognise the importance of climate risks, central banks and regulatory bodies demand improved assessments of disaster risk of local assets and supply chains.

Advancements in geospatial analytics, climate modelling, and financial risk assessment now allow a more precise evaluation of climate-induced risks. Integrating these disciplines enables a deeper understanding of sectoral and global financial vulnerabilities, and supports the development of more effective risk management strategies.

Despite growing attention to climate-related financial risks, significant knowledge gaps remain particularly in the availability and granularity of asset-level data. Many financial institutions lack precise information on the physical location of their assets or those of the companies they invest in, which limits the ability to assess exposure to localized hazards. This challenge is compounded by the difficulty of linking geospatial data with asset ownership, making it hard to evaluate how physical risks translate into financial vulnerabilities at the institutional level.

This PhD research aims to develop a holistic modelling framework for assessing financial risks associated with climate-related hazards at the granularity of asset-level data. Therefore, you will be integrating geospatial data with financial and climate information. You will establish a new protocol for linking asset location to ownership information and for quantifying potential financial losses from various climate-related disasters, the latter being considered both individually or as multi–hazardous events. As such, you will contribute to more accurate financial risk assessments of extreme events linked to climate change, equipping investors, policymakers, and financial institutions with actionable insights for informed decision-making.

Post-doc position on managerial meaning-making in understanding decision-making for organisational change

We seek a postdoctoral researcher who is motivated to study managerial meaning-making within the Dutch Smart Industry. The project aims to improve managers’ ability to lead successful Industry 5.0 transitions by analysing and supporting their meaning-, sense- and decision-making. The ideal candidate is interested in how managers interpret information (for example, about events, actions, contexts) and make meaning of their organisation, its opportunities for growth, and the inner workings of their organisation. You will specifically study how such meaning-making relates to the decisions they make about what changes they are (un)willing to make in their organisation’s ways of working. For example, managers might jump to certain solutions (without fully understanding the implications or needs), postpone or even avoid to engage in their business development. Together with a junior design researcher you will co-design a transformative intervention to support managers’ meaning- and decision-making processes regarding their organization’s Industry 5.0 transformations. Thus, a strong interest in applying theoretical insights to practice is important. Due to the nature of the project, mastering Dutch at minimally the B2 level is a must.

About this project

This postdoctoral project is part of the Smart Skills@Scale project, which aims to support a robust, resilient workforce and a human-centric, sustainable, and resilient Smart Industry. The current position is part of the research line that focuses on supporting organisations in Industry 5.0 transitions through, for example, ensuring human-centric production cells and fostering technology adoption and usage by production workers. You will collaborate with your fellow researchers to find synergy between the role of managers and employees in change processes. For more information about the entire project, please visit our website.

Communication Professional

About the Research Programme
“Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies” (Esdit) is an international research programme of seven academic institutions in the Netherlands. It has a combined budget of € 27 million, and is funded by the Ministry for Education, Culture and Science and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) in the Gravitation funding scheme for excellent research, and by matching funds from the participating institutions. The programme began in January 2020 and will continue till December 2029. The programme has the aim of achieving breakthrough research at the intersection of ethics, philosophy and technology / engineering and to position its consortium at the top of its field internationally. The consortium, counting over 130 researchers, consists of internationally well-known ethicists, philosophers, engineers and social scientists. The programme functions through nine research lines; for a complete overview, see www.esdit.nl .

The Challenge
You are responsible for the external communication of the ESDiT programme, and also have a role in internal communication. You carry out these tasks in consultation with the programme manager, dr. Radhika Mittal, the programme leader, prof. dr. Philip Brey and the project manager, Seeta Autar. You implement policies outlined by the Daily Board (which, besides yourself, includes Mittal, Brey, Autar) and the Management Board (the central strategic board, consisting of nine professors). Tasks include the following:

• Taking responsibility for the communication strategy of the research programme, together with the programme manager and researchers in the programme.
• Writing, editing and coordinating news items, feature articles and other texts for various audiences and media concerning the relationship between technology, society, philosophy and ethics.
• Creating an original representation of the consortium on social media, using the latest techniques and software. Building the consortium’s professional presence and brand on social media platforms, particularly through developing and managing a network of high value external stakeholders.
• Exploring and utilizing new tools (also for visual communication) and ideas to communicate messages to various audiences and in collaboration with stakeholders.
• Supporting researchers in the programme with their communication and impact activities and coordinating the external communication activities.