Postdoc: Business, finance & ownership for positive-energy districts

You will join the EmpowerED project, funded by NWO and led by Professor Floor Alkemade at TU Eindhoven, and work with colleagues at Utrecht School of Economics (U.S.E.) and in the Copernicus Institute alongside our partners in universities, companies, NGOs and municipalities as well as with local stakeholders and communities in case study cities.

EmPowerED aims to deliver a theoretically informed and empirically validated scalable and integrated systems co-creation approach for carbon-neutral heating that can be tailored to the specific local positive energy districts (PEDs). A PED generates more renewable energy than it consumes. But creating such a district is not just a technological task. It requires smart collaboration between residents, municipalities, housing associations, grid operators, and technology providers. Above all, solutions must be affordable, acceptable, and locally appropriate. The project addresses key knowledge gaps in citizen engagement, governance and technology. The consortium consists of 11 knowledge institutes, and 38 societal partners includes diverse citizen groups, civil society organisations, municipalities, grid operators, housing associations and technology & service providers, united in a community of practice. EmPowerED’s novel systems-design toolbox to co-create local heat solutions for PEDs will be tested in real-life use cases and experiments to ensure usability and capacity building.

You will lead research that focuses on novel financial and ownership arrangement that facilitate PED configurations, and business models for the different stakeholder groups. First, drawing on academic and grey literature, you map the financial landscape for investment into PEDs and PED-compatible heat solutions. Key issues are inclusive ownership arrangements, stages of development and investment sources determining risk and risk appetite. Second, you analyse the project’s use-cases (municipalities in the Netherlands) and study up to 10 external cases of innovative financing structures of PEDs, or similar large energy infrastructure investments regarding:

1. involvement of promising financial players;
2. relevant ownership/governance structures for realising (co-)financing; and
3. best practice justice outcomes.

Working in the interdisciplinary Utrecht University team across Economics and Copernicus, you will help to build our understanding of transformative change, focusing on questions of power, agency and systematic/structural change in relation to business models, governance and financing of innovative low-carbon energy technologies. Working with other colleagues across our partner institutions, you will help to identify the key dynamics that support transformative change and develop guidance for future practice. You will also support our collaborative and transdisciplinary research process and activities aimed at engaging and communicating with policy-makers and decision-makers at local, regional and national levels.

If aligned with both your professional development goals and departmental needs, the role may include up to 10% teaching (e.g. teaching a sustainability-related course and/or thesis supervision) for at least the first year of the appointment.

Universitair docent staatsrecht

Je geeft onderwijs aan bachelor- en masterstudenten. Het onderwijs in de bachelor vindt voornamelijk plaats binnen de verplichte vakken Inleiding Staats- en Bestuursrecht, Constitutioneel recht en een of meer keuzevakken in het derde jaar, bijvoorbeeld binnen de minor Maatschappelijke Uitdagingen en de Rechtsstaat. Het masteronderwijs vindt voornamelijk plaats in de master Staats- en bestuursrecht (met name de track Governance, democratie en grondrechten) en mogelijk ook in de master Law and Technology in Europe of de Legal Research Master. In overleg met jou wordt bepaald welke vakken je verzorgt. Je werkt in onderwijsteams waarin collega’s elkaar ondersteunen en van elkaar leren. Je werkt verder mee aan de verbetering van ons onderwijs ten aanzien van bijvoorbeeld inhoudelijke ontwikkeling, didactiek, onderwijsvormen of beroepsvaardigheden. Je bouwt verder je onderwijsvaardigheden uit, bijvoorbeeld – als dit nog nodig is – door het doorlopen van het interne opleidingstraject voor het behalen van de Basiskwalificatie onderwijs. Ook ben je medeverantwoordelijk voor de voortgang van het onderwijs. Je krijgt ook coördinerende taken in het onderwijs.

Je verricht onderzoek dat aansluit bij het programma van het Montaigne Centrum voor Rechtsstaat en Rechtspleging of één van de overige onderzoeksprogramma’s van het departement die zijn ondergebracht in het Utrecht Centre for Regulation and Enforcement in Europe (RENFORCE), het Utrecht Centre for Accountability and Liability Law (UCALL), het Utrecht Centre for European Research into Family Law (UCERF) en het Utrecht Centre for Water, Oceans and Sustainability Law (UCWOSL). Je onderzoek past bovendien in een van de strategische thema’s van de Universiteit Utrecht, zoals Instituties voor Open Samenlevingen, Pathways to Sustainability of Dynamics of Youth. Het is daarnaast mogelijk om aansluiting te zoeken bij een van de thematische onderzoeksplatforms van het departement Rechtsgeleerdheid, zoals EQUALS (Equality Legal Studies), MiLa (Migration Law) of DAI (Data, AI and Law), bij de Legal Teaching Community en het Empirical Legal Studies Lab. Meer informatie over de afdeling vind je op onze website en LinkedInpagina.

Technician Ombion: standardisation of in vitro assays

Often, animal tests are not a good model for human application; they are time-consuming, expensive, and cause animal suffering. To continue improving the health of humans and animals, a radically different approach is needed: making the step to humans and animals faster and more effective, without relying on animal testing by default.

The new Ombion Centre for Animal-Free Biomedical Translation (Ombion - CPBT, in Dutch: Centrum voor Proefdiervrije Biomedische Translatie) will shape this approach, creating new business opportunities around animal-free technologies and biomedical translation. This allows the Netherlands to distinguish itself globally and realize its ambition of becoming a leader in animal-free innovation.

The Ombion - CPBT is a national centre for valorising and disseminating animal-free innovations and expertise. It aims to improve and accelerate the transition of new biomedical innovations to patients and users, at lower costs, and without the use of animals. This will lead to safer, more effective, and better medicines while reducing animal testing.

Together with a large number of national and international partners, the CPBT will work on the development and dissemination of animal-free biomedical innovations and expertise. The initial transition projects will focus on ALS, cystic fibrosis, osteoarthritis/rheumatic diseases, and asthma/COPD. The CPBT will implement the available and developed methods, tools, and expertise together with researchers and companies. The new centre will also offer education, training, advice, and support to enhance the acceptance and use of animal-free biomedical innovations. Combined, the CPBT will run an integrated programme that accelerates the transition to animal-free testing and strengthens the Dutch economy.

For our Ombion - CPBT programme, we are looking for an enthusiastic and skilled technician to support the Ombion validation unit in the development and standardisation of assays to replace animal testing. In addition to supporting the development- and standardization of assays, you will work closely together with the facility manager to ensure smooth operations of the laboratory facilities. Daily tasks will include, but are not limited to:

• cell culture: standard cell cultures as well as advanced cell culture models such as organ-on-a-chip and organoid cultures;
• general laboratory tasks: preparation of solutions and reagents, device maintenance and calibrations;
• inventory management: purchasing, stock checking and interaction with sales personnel;
• preparation of standard operating procedures (SOPs).

You will additionally have access to advanced automation infrastructure to improve reproducibility of developed assays and will work alongside automation experts and scientists to miniaturise and automate select assays.

PhD position in modelling and representation of geographic questions

Geographic questions like 'What is the potential for reducing urban heat in Amsterdam by installing green roofs on existing buildings?' are important in fields such as urban planning, sustainability, and public health. Answering such a question requires the transformation of maps combining different suitable geodata sources, including heat sources and building layouts to generate an answer map. This problem is called indirect question answering, and it is not straightforward with current GeoQA tools. In such scenarios, maps must be created or transformed from other maps.

The ERC funded project GeoTrAnsQData project addresses this by developing a GeoQA method that converts questions into executable geo-analytical workflows, turning geodata into new answer maps accordingly. We use knowledge graphs to model these transformations and apply AI methods to scale them up across large map repositories, enabling users to explore many ways maps can be reused to answer different kinds of questions. This PhD position focuses on understanding, interpreting, parsing and formalising geo-analytical questions. You will explore hybrid (symbolic and sub-symbolic) AI approaches to help users formulate and translate natural language questions into structured representations that can be linked to geospatial data sources and workflows.

You will contribute to the design of the linguistic and conceptual interface between natural language questions and formal workflow models over a geodata repository. In this project, you will:

• build and annotate a corpus of geo-analytical questions and their associated purposes, data needs, and analytical steps in geo-analytical standard scenarios;
• develop a model of geo-analytical purposes (transformation requests) and a corresponding question grammar;
• perform a user study on geo-analytical question formulation to express such purposes;
• contribute to the formalisation of spatial question types using a purpose-driven taxonomy;
• develop a hybrid question parsing pipeline using NLP and formal semantic representations; investigate Large Language Models (LLMs) as well as symbolic AI for question parsing;
• evaluate models based on a gold standard of geo-analytic purposes and questions;
• collaborate with a technical assistant, another PhD candidate (on geodata source modeling), and a postdoc (on the GeoQA reasoning engine).

This position is ideal for someone interested in natural language processing, geographic information and knowledge representation. It is part of the ERC-funded project GeoTrAnsQData, which develops the foundations of a transformative GeoQA methodology through an integrated research program across geoinformatics, AI, and geography. The project is based at the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Utrecht University, and contributes to cutting-edge research on spatial reasoning, semantic technologies, and interdisciplinary AI for geosciences and geography.

PhD: Semantic Modelling of Geodata Sources and Geo-analytical Workflows

Geographic questions like 'What is the potential to reduce urban heat in Amsterdam by installing green roofs on existing buildings?' are important in fields such as urban planning, sustainability, and public health. It requires the transformation of maps combining different suitable geodata sources, including heat sources and building layouts to generate an answer map. This problem is called indirect question answering, and it is not straightforward with current GeoQA tools.

In such scenarios, maps must be created or transformed from other maps. The ERC funded project GeoTrAnsQData project addresses this by developing a GeoQA method that converts questions into executable geo-analytical workflows, turning geodata into new answer maps. Knowledge graphs can be used to model these transformations and to link geodata sources to questions. In this project we will apply symbolic and sub-symbolic AI methods to scale this up across large geodata repositories, enabling users to explore various ways maps can be reused to answer different kinds of questions. We are looking for a motivated PhD candidate to conduct interdisciplinary research that links question answering, knowledge modelling, geo-spatial analysis, and workflow construction. This PhD position focuses on developing a semantic model of the diverse geodata sources in a map repository, enabling reasoning about their analytical purposes and their provenance using concepts of geographic information. You will focus on modelling data resources and workflow generation for geographic question answering.

You will:

• develop a semantic framework and knowledge graph to represent geodata sources, their analytical purpose and their provenance, including abstract geospatial workflows;
• design AI- and machine-learning-based methods that automatically describe and model geodata sources using textual metadata (NLP) and the geodata itself;
• contribute to a corpus of geo-analytical scenarios with questions and corresponding workflows;
• collaborate closely with another PhD candidate (question modelling), a postdoc (GeoQA reasoning engine) and a technical assistant;
• evaluate your framework through user-centred scenarios in spatial-planning or environmental-assessment contexts, and develop annotation manuals and gold standards for benchmarking.

This role is ideal if you are excited about conceptual modelling, spatial data infrastructures and AI-supported reasoning over geographic information. You will work at the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, contributing to cutting-edge research on spatial reasoning, semantic technologies and AI for geosciences.