Professor by Special Appointment in Conservation Science

The Chair builds on the legacy of the Prince Bernhard Chair for International Nature Conservation and carries forward the commitment to academic excellence, global relevance, and the integration of science and practice. Following in the footsteps of internationally recognised scholars such as Norman Myers, Jeffrey A. Sayer, Francis E. Putz, Bill Laurance, Jaboury Ghazoul, and Julia P.G. Jones, you will contribute to advancing the next generation of conservation science.

The Chair in Conservation Science supports science-based conservation by developing multidisciplinary approaches that bridge the gap between science and practice, thereby not only promoting nature conservation efforts but also integrating them to address societal challenges.

A key theme of the Chair is connectivity: both in landscapes and in the way conservation science is conducted and applied. Habitat fragmentation is a major driver of biodiversity loss worldwide. Ecological connectivity is therefore essential for maintaining viable populations, ecosystem functioning, and resilience to environmental change. Understanding how habitat fragmentation affects species, ecological processes, and ecosystem services, and how they respond to restoration and landscape-scale conservation initiatives, is central to addressing today’s conservation challenges.

Effective conservation also depends on connectivity beyond ecology. Progress depends on collective action and collaboration across disciplines, bringing ecological knowledge together with social, economic, and governance perspectives. It also requires connecting researchers, practitioners, policymakers, local communities, and conservation organizations to jointly develop solutions that are both scientifically resilient and socially relevant.

You will advance research on ecological connectivity and landscape-scale conservation while fostering connections across research fields, sectors, countries, and communities. A particular focus will be translating scientific insights into practical applications that support conservation and restoration. By strengthening these multiple forms of connectivity, you will help to develop innovative conservation solutions that benefit both nature and society.

What you will help make happen:

• Generate scientifically robust knowledge that addresses major conservation challenges and informs innovative conservation practice.
• Strengthen the link between academic research and real-world conservation needs.
• Build international collaborations between Utrecht University, universities abroad, conservation organizations, and other stakeholders, as well as facilitate exchanges for students and researchers.
• Lead and contribute to collaborative research projects, publications, and funding proposals, and attract subsequent funding for additional junior researchers.
• Bring diverse perspectives and expertise to enrich research, teaching, and academic debate in conservation science.
• Bridge conservation science and practice through knowledge exchange, outreach, and the dissemination of research findings, while raising awareness of pressing conservation issues.
• Supervise PhD candidates and help train the next generation of conservation scientists.

The Chair will be established as a special chair in the Wildlife Ecology & Nature Restoration research group (established March 2025) in the Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, Utrecht University, and will maintain close links with WWF, in particular its office in the Netherlands.

2 PhD: Process intensification and Electrification in the Chemical Industry

The CO2URAGE program addresses the major societal challenge of transitioning the process industry from fossil fuels to natural resources powered by green electricity. It develops advanced reactors that use process intensification and electrification, and new materials for CO2 capture and react it with electricity-based hydrogen. Since the supply of green energy fluctuates, these reactors must operate dynamically, radically different from current industrial practices. In CO2URAGE, new process control schemes are developed to tailor production to dynamic operations, and system modeling and simulations are performed on different system scales to assess their feasibility in terms of economics and ecological performance.

Research Focus: The transition to renewable electricity is reshaping the conditions under which the chemical industry operates. Electricity and hydrogen prices will fluctuate, at times even turning negative, so processes that can adjust their operation to these signals may become more competitive and better prepared for a future with high renewable surplus electricity.

PhD-position 1 – Process and system design and optimization
This first PhD-project aims at directly supporting the technology development carried out in CO2URAGE by understanding the technology optimal operation in future systems and by identifying the key properties that make them competitive. Accordingly, you will develop optimization models (mixed-integer linear programming) that capture the essential dynamic behaviour of these technologies, such as part-load performance, ramping limits, operating windows, and startup and shutdown behaviour, in a form suitable for time and space-resolved system optimization. You will use these models to determine the optimal design and operation of production systems under electricity and hydrogen price scenarios for 2030, 2040 and 2050. The research will move across the plant, cluster and the system level. It will examine how these processes interact with local renewable generation, batteries, hydrogen storage, electrolysers and heat supply in a (Dutch) industrial cluster. It also explores how large, flexible chemical plants can support national electricity, hydrogen and CO2 infrastructures. You will work closely with fellow PhD candidates and with industrial partners including RWE, DNV, TenneT and Gasunie.

PhD-position 2 – Value chain design and life cycle assessment
Whether new technologies for converting CO2 into base chemicals succeed depends not only on the technologies themselves, but also on the value chains around them. These chains run from CO2 sources and renewable power supply to the end users of the products. Understanding how these technologies could be deployed at scale therefore requires linking energy system modelling with value chain design. Accordingly, this PhD-project will develop deployment scenarios together with industrial partners. You will build a new hybrid modelling framework that combines agent-based modelling, which simulates how heterogeneous actors make decisions and adapt to change, with mixed-integer linear optimization, which identifies high-quality system configurations. The framework will be used to explore questions such as centralized versus decentralized deployment and the infrastructure requirements. It will then be applied to selected case studies for the technologies developed in the project. Finally, you will assess the environmental consequences of large-scale deployment through consequential life cycle assessment. This will reveal how growing demand and the corresponding expansion of the technologies affect the environmental performance of the system as a whole. This position will be co-supervised by Prof. Andrea Ramirez at TU Delft, including the possibility to work part-time at TU Delft.

Societal relevance of the project: The transition to a CO2 net-zero society requires a major rethinking of the energy system, with coordinated, timely deployment of several technologies. Among the different sectors that need to become CO2 neutral, the chemical industry will be confronted with a daunting, yet existential challenge: to produce large amounts of carbon-based platform molecules starting from renewable energy and non-fossil material feedstocks. Given the scale of production and associated CO2 emissions, the large capital investments of plants, and the limited time available for the transition, the de-fossilization of the chemical industry is a cornerstone for a net-zero society. Many of the new unit operations required for a sustainable chemical industry are based on conventional chemical practices, for example hydrogen-base CO2 conversion. However, beyond feedstock changes, current chemical processes are not yet adapted to accommodate the dynamic nature of sustainable energy sources such as solar and wind. The main challenge will be matching the intermittent supply of green natural resources with product demand. CO2URAGE will help transforming the chemical industry into a key enabler for the energy transition.

PhD position in micro- and nanoplastic research

In this PhD project, you will investigate whether new bio-based and degradable plastics are truly safe and sustainable alternatives to conventional fossil-based plastics. You will follow these materials throughout their entire degradation process: from changes in the original plastic to the formation and identification of micro- and nanoplastics and chemical leachates, and ultimately to their potential effects on human health. Your research will combine analytical chemistry, materials characterization and in vitro toxicology.

You will:

• Investigate plastic degradation by exposing pristine polymers and plastic products to controlled food-contact and environmental conditions, studying changes in their chemical composition, physical properties and material integrity;
• Characterize polymer degradation products, including micro- and nanoplastics, dissolved compounds and leachates, using complementary analytical techniques such as infrared microspectroscopy, atomic force microscopy (AFM), AFM-IR, electron microscopy and mass spectrometry;
• Assess potential human health hazards of plastic materials and their degradation products using a tiered in vitro testing strategy, starting with screening for cytotoxicity, oxidative stress and endocrine activity;
• Investigate higher tier biological effects and mechanisms of toxicity using human-relevant cell models, including intestinal, liver, immune and neuronal systems, to study particle uptake, biological barrier integrity, inflammation, metabolism and neurotoxicity;
• Integrate chemical and toxicological findings to establish relationships between polymer composition, degradation behavior and biological effects, translating these insights into actionable recommendations for Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD).

A unique aspect of this position is that you will work across two research environments at Utrecht University. You will spend roughly half of your time at the Institute for Sustainable and Circular Chemistry (ISCC) and half at the Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences (IRAS). Rather than conducting chemistry and toxicology as separate components, you will actively connect them: toxicological observations can trigger further chemical analysis, while insights into degradation and composition will guide toxicological experiments. In this way, you will serve as a scientific bridge between the two institutes. You will also collaborate closely with researchers from chemistry, materials science and toxicology, as well as the broader interdisciplinary BIOSTAR-SSbD consortium and its academic, societal and industrial partners. Through this environment, you will develop a unique interdisciplinary scientific profile at the interface of analytical chemistry, micro- and nanoplastics research, toxicology and sustainable materials design.

Software developer for GeoFAIR project

This function specifically targets software development for the GeoFAIR project. The project aims to improve the discoverability, interoperability, and reuse of existing (inter)national infrastructure for data sharing (e.g. online data tools and portals, data standards, web viewers) by developing an integration layer through which their metadata can be harvested and searched. The resulting integrated connection services will be deployed in the Delta Enigma data infrastructure; the national access point for biogeomorphology research data: https://delta-enigma.nl/. In this role, you will work together with the task leader to explore and develop methods for data exchange using automated workflows. You can also contribute to (inter)national network and associated meetings if you are interested.

This is what you will do:

• being involved in the entire process of making research data collected by sensors and generated in laboratories from rivers, estuaries and coasts easier to re-use;
• interacting with other developers and engineers internally within the project and externally at collaborators;
• using adopted (meta)data standards and existing data processing methods to develop new data transfer procedures
• contribute to designing a common metadata model and document mapping between the existing metadata standards, writing automated tests to ensure the quality of your software;
• involve project stakeholders to realize new features or make integration layers on top of the existing data infrastructures.

Onderwijscoördinator master Diergeneeskunde

Als onderwijscoördinator ben je de schakel tussen de opleidingsdirecteur, collega’s van het Onderwijscentrum en departementale onderwijssecretariaten, studenten en docenten. Je denkt mee over verschillende vraagstukken m.b.t. de opleiding en stemt deze af binnen het Onderwijscentrum en het onderwijsmanagement.

Je taken en verantwoordelijkheden bestaan uit het volgende:

• Je bent de vanzelfsprekende rechterhand van de opleidingsdirecteur in alle zaken aangaande de organisatie van onderwijs;
• Je denkt mee over de praktische en logistieke kant van het onderwijsbeleid en bent verantwoordelijk voor de praktische implementatie hiervan binnen de opleiding;
• Je ziet waar processen beter kunnen, adviseert hierin en werkt deze samen met je collega’s van het Onderwijscentrum uit tot een effectief werkproces. Je beweegt je daarbij nadrukkelijk horizontaal door de afdeling heen;
• Je organiseert een aantal werkprocessen, zoals de inschrijving voor de profileringscursussen, kwaliteitszorg en het cursuscoördinatoren overleg;
• Je werkt nauw samen met de keyusers en onderwijsondersteuners van de master opleiding;
• Je beheert het cursusaanbod en draagt bij aan de uitvoering van de onderwijs- en examenregeling (OER);
• Je bent verantwoordelijk voor het updaten van opleidingsspecifieke informatie op bijvoorbeeld de studenten website.
• Je draagt bij aan de bedrijfsvoering van het onderwijs, onder meer door te borgen dat de gevraagde onderwijsinzet binnen de financiële kaders blijft;
• Je bent achterwacht voor een aantal logistieke processen.