PhD kandidaat: De rol van het cerebellum in lichaamsbeeld

De afdeling Psychologische Functieleer heeft een vacature voor een gemotiveerde PhD-kandidaat op het gebied van de cognitieve neurowetenschappen. Je gaat werken in een team met expertise in lichaamsrepresentatie, hersenstimulatie, cerebellumfunctie en multisensorische integratie, en zult bijdrgaen aan fundamentele kennis en kennis die kan leiden tot mogelijk nieuwe behandelingen.

In deze functie ben je verantwoordelijk voor het uitvoeren van onderzoek naar de rol van het cerebellum bij het updaten van de lichaamsrepresentatie. Je:

• ontwikkelt en voert multisensorische illusie-experimenten uit bij gezonde deelnemers, om te onderzoeken hoe zintuiglijke signalen en verwachtingen worden gewogen bij het bijstellen van het lichaamsbeeld;
• combineert deze experimenten met niet-invasieve hersenstimulatie (TMS, tDCS, tACS) om de rol van het cerebellum te testen;
• past de ontwikkelde paradigma's toe bij mensen met anorexia nervosa, om te onderzoeken of verstoorde cerebellaire aansturing samenhangt met individuele verschillen in symptomen;
• gebruikt geavanceerde statistiek om te analyseren hoe sensorische en voorafgaande signalen worden gewogen;
• schrijft wetenschappelijke publicaties en presenteert je werk op (inter)nationale congressen;

Ongeveer 10% van je werkzaamheden bestaat uit onderwijstaken, zoals het begeleiden van bachelor- en masterscripties en werkgroepen voor vakken gerelateerd aan de experimentele psychologie. Uiteraard word je begeleid en ondersteund door je leidinggevende en collega’s.

PhD Candidate on Neurodiversity and Inclusion in Higher Education

IThe Department of Developmental Psychology has a job opening for a PhD candidate in the field of neurodiversity and inclusive higher education.

In this project, you will examine how educational, social and physical university environments shape academic participation, sense of belonging and wellbeing among neurodivergent students, including students with ADHD and autism. Students from ethnic minority backgrounds will serve as a comparison group, allowing you to examine whether contextual processes are specific to neurodivergent students or reflect broader patterns of minority inclusion.

Traditional research on inclusive education often relies on institutional averages or individual-level outcomes. This may conceal localised exclusion and substantial differences between student groups within apparently successful classrooms. You will therefore develop and apply multilevel models that treat group-level disparities in inclusion as meaningful characteristics of the educational environment. The project will distinguish universally poor environments from classrooms with acceptable average outcomes but large inclusion disparities, and will investigate whether high-disparity classrooms are associated with assimilation pressure, masking and a reduced sense of authenticity.

Your main tasks will include:

• refining the conceptual framework and formulating research questions and hypotheses;
• designing and conducting empirical studies in higher education and coordinating data collection;
• examining teaching practices informed by Universal Design for Learning, the sensory environment and social inclusion;
• developing and applying multilevel models that capture both average inclusion and disparities between student groups;
• analysing associations with academic participation, belonging, wellbeing, masking and authenticity;
• writing international scientific publications and a doctoral dissertation, and presenting your work at conferences;
• translating findings into practical recommendations in collaboration with the USO project NeUUroinclusive Education and relevant university stakeholders;
• Teaching/supervision of theses (max. 10% of your time).

PhD: A Multimodal Analysis of Emotion, Narrative, and Migration Politics Online

This PhD project examines the role of emotionally charged migration narratives in digital societies. It investigates how these narratives are constructed and circulated online, how individuals interpret and emotionally respond to them, and how these interpretations are associated with different forms of political engagement. A central question is under what conditions emotionally charged migration narratives are linked to political engagement?

The project will combine multimodal social media analysis with survey experiments, and data-donation methods. By connecting digital communication with individuals’ interpretations and political responses, the research will provide a more comprehensive understanding of how online migration debates become politically consequential.

Supervision Team
The project will be supervised by Jisu Kim, Marcel Lubbers and Alber Ali Salah at Utrecht University. The project is embedded in the Department of Interdisciplinary Social Science.

Your job
Together with your supervisory team;

• You will design and conduct novel empirical studies;
• You will investigate new insights across disciplines, including sociology, political science, computational social science, and data science;
• You will contribute to the theoretical development of the concept of migration narratives;
• With our support, you will be in charge of all aspects of data collection (from data scraping from online platforms, and recruiting participants to the design);
• You will use advanced statistical and computational methods to process and analyze data;
• You will write international peer-reviewed scientific papers;
• You will work in a collaborative environment that seeks to improve one another’s research;
• You will present your work at international conferences for academics, policy makers, and educators.

Postdoc position in Efficient NLP for Information Extraction from News

This 24-month postdoctoral position is a close collaboration between the National Police Lab AI (Floris Bex and Jelte Mense) and the Natural Language Processing Group (Albert Gatt) at Utrecht University. Together, we want to explore how small models can extract useful information on specific crime themes, such as drug trafficking, primarily from publicly available news sources. Relevant tasks include identifying relevant entities (who did what, where), and inferring timelines (when, and in what order) and relations (e.g. links to specific countries or groups). A promising direction is to train or fine-tune small-scale models via distillation from larger models, including through the use of synthetic data. This in turn raises interesting questions about the robustness of the resulting models, their ability to generalise, and their susceptibility to known issues related to synthetic data training, such as model collapse.

As a postdoctoral researcher on this project, you will:

• Design and evaluate methods for multimodal entity, timeline and relation extraction from multilingual news sources.
• Fine-tune and distil small-scale language models from larger models, including via synthetic data generation.
• Investigate the robustness, generalisability and limitations (e.g. model collapse) of the resulting models.
• Apply and validate the approach on real-world use cases, such as drug trafficking, together with the Netherlands police.
• Publish and present your findings at relevant conferences and in scientific journals.

Allround Paraveterinair Gezelschapsdieren Universitair Dierenziekenhuis

Als allround paraveterinair speel je een onmisbare rol in de zorg voor onze patiënten. Je ondersteunt dierenartsen en specialisten bij de opvang en behandeling van voornamelijk tweede- en derdelijns (spoed)patiënten die zowel overdag als buiten kantooruren worden aangemeld. Je krijgt te maken met een grote diversiteit aan patiënten, ziektebeelden en specialistische behandelingen, waardoor je jezelf voortdurend blijft ontwikkelen.

Omdat wij een universitair dierenziekenhuis zijn, begeleid je ook coassistenten in de laatste fase van hun opleiding. Zo draag je niet alleen bij aan de beste zorg voor onze patiënten, maar ook aan de opleiding van toekomstige dierenartsen.

Wij zoeken een collega voor 3 of 4 diensten per week. Ons dierenziekenhuis is 24 uur per dag, 7 dagen per week geopend. Daarom werk je naast doordeweekse dagdiensten op de poli op roulatiebasis ook mee in de avond- en nachtdiensten in het weekend.