PhD position in Geosciences students’ professional identity development

‘Who do I want to become’ is a question young people often struggle with at the start of their student career. Many students of geography are uncertain about their future career, which can affect their study success and future transition to work. Utrecht University invites applications for a PhD research position investigating Geoscience students’ sense of their future professional selves and how the faculty of Geosciences’ educational programs can help strengthen students’ professional identity development.

Unlike medicine or law, a geography degree does not lead to a clearly delineated profession; rather ‘geography is what geographers do’ as is sometimes said. However, this is not helpful for students in the process of developing professional identity. Despite the crucial role geographers and earth scientists play in addressing sustainability challenges, the field’s broad career spectrum and limited visibility of job opportunities within degree programmes often generates uncertainty among prospective students and an unclear sense of their professional trajectory. While a focus on students’ professional identity development is common in law, engineering and medicine, recent research suggests students in social science and humanities programs might also profit from educational activities that develop their professional identity. Our students and alumni indicate that the same could also be true for geosciences education. We want to know how geography students’ professional identity develops during the course of their study, understand how it affects their motivation and self-efficacy and learn which educational activities could strengthen their professional identity development.

The PhD project thereby contributes to our educational ambition in the faculty of Geosciences to enhance students’ development. The PhD candidate will therefore have direct impact with their scientific practice and results by identifying and enhancing emergent educational practices, while collaborating with teams to support their enactment. We also seek to create societal impact by strengthening collaborations between students, alumni, professional societies (KNAG) and the wider public.

The project
The PhD-project connects educational sciences, geography education and physical and human geography and requires close contact with students, student representatives and educators of undergraduate and graduate educational programs, alumni and professional societies. You will be supervised by an interdisciplinary team consisting of Dr. Marielle Zill, Dr. Tom Wils, Prof. Dr. Maarten Kleinhans and Prof. Dr. Tine Béneker and be embedded in the Geography & Education Section at the department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning. As a PhD-candidate you will be embedded in a tightly-knit and inspiring community of ten PhD students conducting research at the intersection of geography and education.

Your main responsibilities will include:

• Conduct a mixed-methods case study research, including several components;
• Design and administer a cross-sectional survey among bachelor’s and master’s students in human geography & planning and in earth sciences, in order to measure disciplinary interest development and identification as well as self-efficacy, enabling comparison across stages of study and between programs;
• Conduct focus groups with students of each cohort to contextualize research findings of the survey and conduct mixed focus groups with students, staff, and non-academic professionals to examine how participation in professional settings contributes to supporting internationalization of disciplinary norms and values;
• Perform a curriculum and institutional analysis, including document analysis and semi-structured interviews with staff and program coordinators to assess how curriculum design and pedagogy align with students’ experiences;
• Perform a longitudinal narrative study of several bachelor and master’s students from both study programs analyzing student’s individual trajectories;
• Write and publish the results in academic and professional publications;
• Present the findings at national and international conferences and workshops and at the faculty of Geosciences;
• Support program heads and staff in co-creatively designing and enacting project insights and designing educational activities supporting students’ professional identity development;
• Manage your own project under the guidance of the supervision team.

The PhD position also includes teaching relevant courses at the Faculty of Geosciences and/or Graduate School of Teaching (max. 10% of the appointment)

PhD in Relational Monitoring for Liveable Futures

Monitoring is one of the core functions of knowledge infrastructures, which are combinations of technologies, practices, actors and institutions. As currently implemented, monitoring mainly supports the distanced and disciplined surveillance of phenomena and emphasises repeated series of measurements to convey trends. While this approach provides objective, comparable and computable insights, it produces knowledge that aims to observe and describe, and that by definition, is separate from action and engagement.

This approach has been widely critiqued and powerful proposals have been put forth that connect knowing and acting (transformative change, contaminating encounters, situated knowledge, radical interdependence, combining accountability and learning (Tsing, Haraway, Escobar, Garzon-Lopez, Regeer, etc). These proposal constitute an important starting point for this project that explores a paradigm in which monitoring supports iteration, intervention and transformation. It stimulates deep learning and ‘frame-reflexivity’, rather than thin learning for optimization (Chambers et al). Such an approach requires on-going and inclusive dialogue among knowledge holders and awareness of how infrastructures embed knowledge in socio-material relations.

A second significant starting point is the focus on relations rather than objects. Through increased attention to relations and their patterns—connections, context and interdependence-- different kinds of knowledge emerge. A focus on relations foregrounds the ethical aspects of knowledge and provides an alternative to the object-oriented mode of modern empirical inquiry—and to its modes of commensurability and scalability that connect the natural world to processes of reification and commodification. This kind of knowledge can reshape the way in which we as humans (researchers, citizens, etc.) interact and relate to the more-than-human world. Such knowledges where knowing is seen as an embedded practice and entwined with values, can contribute to redefining the relationship between humans and natures and enrich the interplay between science and politics. Such ways of knowing can open up new avenues to problematising and addressing pressing global challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental pollution and inequalities.

In this PhD position, you will both analyse and intervene. This means contributing to an understanding of how novel practices of monitoring can conceptually and concretely be supported by knowledge infrastructures. You will explore how diverse types of evidence can be connected through monitoring practices and how meaningful relations to context, to sense of place and lived experience can be incorporated in knowledge infrastructures. Your work will support approaches to knowledge creation that enable engagement of a variety of stakeholders and connection between knowing and acting.

You will work with different projects engaged in monitoring biodiversity (and potentially on topics like land use, and water resource management that are connected to the Faculty of Geosciences). Depending on your interests and background, you will embed yourself in monitoring projects and together with the project teams envision, design and develop the organisational and digital tools required for relational monitoring. Using qualitative methods and action research among other approaches, you will analyse existing monitoring efforts, identify challenges and co-develop practical approaches through workshops and design sessions.

This PhD position contributes to the work of the Urban Futures Studio by exploring how knowledge infrastructures can emphasise relations so that knowledge can better contribute to liveable futures. The connection between knowledge and action is made explicit, so that knowledge infrastructures can help politicize the status quo (Hajer and Oomen 2025). The project will yield prototypes, experiments and novel implementations that can clarify, reinforce and legitimate the contribution of knowledge infrastructures to futuring and their role in democratic societies.

You will be based at the Copernicus Institute for Sustainability at Utrecht University and can partake in the training offered by the faculty graduate and by WTMC research school. Your will be supervised by a multi-disciplinary supervision team (including Anne Beaulieu and Sietze Norder) and be a member of the Urban Futures Studio. The Urban Futures Studio explores sustainable and meaningfully democratic futures, and ways to get there. As a transdisciplinary group, we collaborate with policymakers, activists, artists, and students to enable alternative futures. Knowledge infrastructures are powerful tools that connect past, present and futures. In this project, the challenge is to develop knowledge infrastructures that will generate new possibilities for action based on situated knowledge and engagement of a range of stakeholders.

As part of the Copernicus Institute, you can expect the following:

• Real-world impact: Your research is set up to directly empower researchers, stakeholders and to influence policy;
• Innovative methods: Work with cutting-edge approaches including arts-based interventions, connecting concepts and practice
• Strong support network: Benefit from experienced supervisors, peer mentoring, and a dynamic cohort of PhDs
• Societal engagement: Develop work that is relevant to practitioners, policymakers, and citizens—not just academics;
• Career development: Build skills in transdisciplinary research, stakeholder engagement, design, and knowledge translation.

Your main tasks include:

• Conduct interviews, participant observation, and document analysis;
• Facilitate workshops on infrastructure development for new approaches to monitoring;
• Develop an overview of approaches to monitoring
• Identify inspiring projects that experiment with novel forms of monitoring
• Connect with a number of initiatives that can serve as partners/cases in the research
• Navigate tensions between agendas and work to engage participants
• Elaborate the design of monitoring approaches that can support novel forms of knowledge production, legitimation and circulation
• Communicate the outcomes of the research in a range of formats appropriate for different audiences (academic publications, practitioner-oriented resources, zines, podcasts, etc.)

If you are motivated by critical reform of scientific research, are eager to support transformative change and wish to combine conceptual work with societal impact, this role offers you a meaningful environment to do so.

PhD in Parenting and caregiving in contaminated water landscapes

This project explores parents’ everyday experiences and future visions of raising children in an environment impacted by PFAS contamination of soils and groundwater. PFAS contamination in the environment is often studied in disciplinary siloes: it is understood from either a natural sciences or social science perspective. As a result, previous research has overlooked how PFAS function simultaneously physically and socially as well as how they leave physical and social long-term traces in parents’ lives and environments.

Current scholarship in human geography centers on toxic geographies, in which scholars have argued that the gradual exposure that residents endure is a form of structural and slow violence. They posit that toxic living environments are not necessarily invisible, but that powerful actors do not recognise the experiences of the residents who inhabit toxic spaces, especially those who are most vulnerable, such as children. In contrast, quantitative research on PFAS-contaminated areas generally focuses on mapping the status quo by measuring PFAS concentrations in soil and groundwater and comparing them to current limit values. There is little attention for the legacy effects of PFAS contamination, even though these determine the safety of drinking water resources in future and thus the precautions needed to provide and consume drinking water with safe PFAS levels in the long-term.

This PhD project will empirically connect these bodies of literature by showing how a planetary health issue (PFAS as a ‘forever chemical’ circulating through water systems and bodies) is lived and negotiated in specific households and places. We will apply a planetary health lens to disentangle the links between human and non-human interactions in polluted environments. The PhD candidate will innovatively combine qualitative social science methods with soil and water measurements and PFAS modelling, with the aim of understanding parents’ experiences and future visions, support them in dealing with PFAS water contamination, and stimulate exchange between authorities, affected communities and the general public on the topic.

The PhD candidate will conduct independent research under supervision in the Human Geography Department (Dr. Sara Brouwer at Geography & Education and Prof. Ajay Bailey at International Development Studies Section) and Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development (Dr. Stefanie Lutz at Environmental Sciences Section). This project will address the following research questions and methods:

• Stakeholder mapping: how do key stakeholders at different levels approach PFAS water contamination?
• Water quality modelling: what is the extent and time horizon of future PFAS contamination of soils and groundwater?
• Qualitative social science methods: how do parents (and caregivers) living in or near a PFAS contaminated area understand, experience, act upon and anticipate PFAS water contamination?
• Impact: how can the social and natural science results be used to effectively inform and engage key stakeholders to best support parents in dealing with PFAS water contamination and advocate for their reproductive right to raise children in healthy environments?

The case studies of PFAS water contamination are preferably in Europe or Southern Africa and will be determined in consultation with the PhD candidate. Besides societal relevance, the choice will be based on the expertise, affinity, experience and networks of the candidate and the supervisory team.

The PhD candidate will be embedded in a network of PhD candidates working on Planetary Health topics at the Faculty of Geosciences and across Utrecht University’s strategic theme on Life Sciences.

PhD on Industrial Wastewater Permits for Sustainable Water Quality

With climate change, rising demand, and pollution threatening water supplies, the BlueVantage project brings the water sector together to develop technical and governance solutions, thereby ensuring a clean water cycle for industry, ecology, and society. By working closely with water companies, innovations are tested in real-life situations.

At present, large challenges exist in meeting the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) water quality goals due to high pollutant emissions. Industrial emissions are authorized by the water manager, but water treatment at the plant is often not optimized for removal of chemical pollutants. This can lead to serious emissions of chemical pollutants to surface water and indirectly to groundwater, thus standing in the way of meeting the WFD targets and causing problems for water re-use.

In this PhD project we aim to determine and predict the influence of industrial discharge permits on the water quality in the Netherlands. In addition, we will test the efficiency of nature-based treatment solutions in the urban context for industrial wastewater treatment. By better understanding the relationship between industrial discharge permits and (urban) water quality, this project aims to contribute to the development of guidance for the permitting authorities for including (nature-based) treatment in the permitting process.

Four main steps are envisaged in this project:

1. An inventory will be made of current industrial discharge permits coupled to modelled and measured water quality data in the Rhine-Meuse rivers and regional water systems in the Netherlands;
2. Model and measure the chemical composition and toxicity of industrial effluents;
3. Provide insight into the potential of nature-based treatment technologies for industrial discharges in the urbanized context;
4. Model water quality under different permitting scenarios.

A personalised training programme will be set up, reflecting your training needs and career objectives, in the context of the UU Graduate School of Geosciences. About 20% of your time will be dedicated to this training component, which includes training on the job in assisting in the Bachelor and Master programmes of the department at Utrecht University (10% of your time).

PhD position in Mechano-catalytic conversion of plastic waste

Use your experience with catalysis, polymer science, and/or mechano-chemistry to develop new recycling technologies for plastics using mechano-catalytic milling. You will enter a relatively unexplored field of chemistry together with an expanding team of PhD students and Postdocs. You will also spend a few months with our collaborators at the Fraunhofer Institute WKI in Germany and the WAB company in Switzerland.

This project aims to pioneer the conversion of photo-curing resins, such as breaking crosslinks to enable solubility and recycling. By unravelling the intricate interplay between mechanical forces, catalysis, and selective polymer chain cleavage, you will gain valuable insights into the fundamental mechanisms shaping the future of recycling technology. You will develop operando spectroscopic techniques to track the bond cleavage during ball milling. Embrace the array of cutting-edge spectroscopic and analytic techniques (e.g., EPR, SEC, Raman, IR, and TGA) within the Institute of Sustainable and Circular Chemistry (ISCC), and become a trailblazer in mechano-catalytic polymer recycling.

Your main tasks:

• Develop a low temperature mechano-catalytic route to enable resin recycling
• Enable selective bond cleavage
• Develop new surface activated mechano-catalysts
• Excel in a top chemistry group with state-of-the-art equipment