PhD developing reconstructions for storms in a warmer climate

We invite applications for a PhD position in the 4-year research project PAST, funded by the Dutch Research Council ().

Project PAST, “A proxy-model alliance to decode storms in warmer climates”, aims to quantify the occurrence of storms over western Europe during warmer climates. Climate change is known to increase the risk to societies and ecosystems from extreme weather events. But these short-lived events are notoriously hard to reconstruct and model, so our understanding of their behaviour during warmer climates is limited. To learn from past warmer climates and better understand the link between climate and extremes, we can use proxy-based climate reconstructions and climate models for past warmer climates. However, the temporal and spatial resolutions of these have so far been inadequate to capture climate extremes.

PAST overcomes this obstacle, both from the side of proxy reconstructions and of climate modelling. It develops the first reconstructions of storms in the geological past using fossil shells. Plus, it produces new, high-resolution computer models of the warm Last Interglacial period. Finally, PAST creates new knowledge by synthesising these two approaches through advanced statistics.

This exciting PhD project is one of two PhD projects within PAST. As a PhD candidate, your goal is to develop the first-ever reconstructions of storms in the geological past. You will do so in three steps: Firstly, you lead biological growth experiments with live molluscs (cockles, mussels and clams) at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ). This helps you understand how these animals build their shells on hourly timescales and record storm events. Secondly, you analyse the shells of live-collected molluscs in the North Sea and Wadden Sea in the state-of-the-art NIGEL geochemistry lab, to test how they recorded natural storms. Thirdly, you apply your knowledge to reconstruct storm distributions during the Last Interglacial period. Using fossil shells from the Netherlands, Canary Islands and the Azores islands, you compare how storminess changed in a warmer climate at different latitudes. Throughout the project, you work closely with the other PhD candidate of PAST, who will work on the high-resolution climate models. You contrast and combine data across reconstructions and models, and enhance our understanding of the link between climate and extreme weather in Europe.

You will work in close collaboration with colleagues from the NIOZ and TNO-Geological Survey of the Netherlands along with other partners from Naturalis Biodiversity Center and the universities of the Azores and Tenerife (La Laguna). As part of the PhD project, you will visit collections and core repositories of the partner institutes and join field trips to collect molluscs in the research area.

Your duties

• Design and carry out your own biological experiments
• Carry out high-resolution chemical measurements in the VU lab
• Place your results in the context of existing reconstructions and the new PAST-model outcomes
• Present your research at scientific conferences and publish your results in scientific journals
• Contributing to teaching and supervising in bachelor and master programs

Postdoc on Tradeoffs, Synergies and Conflicts around Photovoltaic Panels

The postdoc project is part of the collaborative European BIODIVERSA+ project JustBioSolar that investigates, with a group of partner institutes across Europe, conflicts around the deployment of solar panels on agricultural lands in Europe.

At VU Amsterdam we are tasked with providing a European scale overview of recurring trade-offs and conflicts in deployment of photovoltaics. Locations of documented conflict will be harvested through AI-assisted media analysis. We will use a form of topic modelling as a method for automated content analysis. Topic models are a probabilistic method that allows organizing the contents of a text corpus into a set of semantically coherent concepts. As a data source we will use a wide range of sources including newspapers and social media and the scientific literature. Based on the obtained data we aim to make an archetypical characterization of these conflict situations and a map of locations where there is the probability of finding these archetypes. The task collaborates with other project partners that gather in-depth insights in case studies conducted and variations in multi-level governance conditions across European countries addressed by another project partner. Outputs are an overview of archetypical situations with trade-offs between biocultural and biodiversity values and photovoltaic deployment. In addition, the WP will describe the role of contextual factors in these trade-offs and produce a European scale risk map of potential conflicts.

Your duties

• you collect data, employ automated content analysis, prepare maps and exchange insights and data with other project partners
• you engage in project collaboration to add value to the European consortium and link top-down and bottom-up approaches of gathering information on conflicts surrounding photovoltaic deployment
• you collaborate with the project partners towards making the case studies comparable
• you publish high quality, peer-reviewed research in international scientific journals

PhD high-resolution modelling of past warmer climates

We invite applicants for a 4-year PhD position in research project PAST, funded by the Dutch Research Council.

Project PAST, “A proxy-model alliance to decode storms in warmer climates”, aims to quantify the occurrence of storms over western Europe during warmer climates. Climate change is known to increase the risk to societies and ecosystems from extreme weather events. But these short-lived events are notoriously hard to reconstruct and to model, so our understanding of their behaviour during warmer climates is limited. To learn from past warmer climates and better understand the link between climate and extremes, we can use proxy-based climate reconstructions and climate models for past warmer climates. However, the temporal and spatial resolutions of these have so far been inadequate.

PAST overcomes this obstacle, both from the side of proxy reconstructions and of climate modelling. It develops the first reconstructions of storms in the geological past using fossil shells. In parallel, it produces new, high-resolution computer models of the warm Last Interglacial period. Finally, PAST creates new knowledge by synthesising these two approaches through advanced statistics.

This PhD project is one of two within PAST. As a PhD candidate your goal is to conduct new climate model simulations of the Last Interglacial, with a state-of-the-art climate model (CESM). From these results, you analyse patterns of Atlantic storminess. The Last Interglacial is the most recent climate that was warmer than the present in the Northern Hemisphere. This makes it a unique analogue of the warmer climate of the coming decades. As a researcher in PAST, you execute model simulations at very high resolution on the Dutch supercomputer Snellius. This is novel research for this paleoclimate. Your key challenge is to design and implement a clever set of simulations. This will systematically address the key sources of uncertainty regarding climate and storminess in the Northern Hemisphere during the Last Interglacial. For this, you leverage the most recent knowledge about this paleoclimate, and collaborate with leading international climate researchers at Utrecht University (NL) and at NCAR (USA).

Throughout the project, you work closely with the other PhD candidate of PAST, who creates high-resolution proxy-based reconstructions of the same paleoclimate. Together, you apply a Bayesian statistical framework to contrast and combine data across reconstructions and model results. This will enhance our understanding of the link between climate and extreme weather in Western Europe. The insights from modelling and proxy-model synthesis will be impactful in a range of climate-related disciplines.

Your duties

• you design a set of climate model simulations, addressing the key sources of uncertainty of storminess in a warmer climate
• you execute simulations on the Dutch supercomputer Snellius
• you analyse patterns of storminess and other key climate extremes in the results
• you synthesize results from model and proxies through Bayesian statistics
• you present your research at scientific conferences and publish your results in scientific journals
• you contribute to teaching and supervising in bachelor and master programs

Tandarts–endodontoloog

Als tandartsdocent lever je een significante bijdrage aan het structureren en verbeteren van het onderwijs en de zorg in de sectie Endodontologie. Binnen de sectie werken we interdisciplinair samen met tandheelkundige en medische specialisten.
De kern van de werkzaamheden bestaan uit:
Onderwijs binnen Master 2 en andere delen van het onderwijs. Opstellen van verbetervoorstellen naar aanleiding van onderwijsevaluaties voor de toegewezen onderwijsonderdelen. Klinische Begeleiding van tandartsen endodontologen in opleiding en studenten.

Jouw taken

• Bachelor, masterstudenten begeleiden/coachen in het niet-patiëntgebonden en preklinisch en klinisch onderwijs.
• Supervisie geven op de patiëntzorgtaken van de studenten inclusief studenten van Oral Health Sciences profiel Endodontologie.
• Begeleiden/coachen van studenten Oral Health Sciences profiel Endodontologie.
• Deelnemen aan patiëntenbesprekingen. Verzorgen van theoretische onderdelen in het onderwijs Tandheelkunde en Oral Health Sciences.

Managementassistent en ondersteuner kwaliteitszorg interne arbodienst

De interne arbodienst van de Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) zoekt een ervaren managementassistent. Samen met twee collega’s op het secretariaat zorg je voor de ondersteuning van de bedrijfsartsen, de manager en de andere arbo-professionals. Procesmatige ondersteuning van de interne kwaliteitszorg voor de certificering van de arbodienst maakt een vast onderdeel uit van je functie.

Jouw taken

• je ondersteunt als managementassistent op het secretariaat van de arbodienst de andere deskundigen en de manager: notuleren bij vergaderingen, afsprakenbeheer, communicatie, beheer van in- en externe contacten, informatie- en archiefbeheer, (jaar)planningen, tekstredactie, zaalreserveringen, bestellingen, etc.
• je ondersteunt de bedrijfsartsen administratief: (telefonische) receptiefunctie, afspraken plannen voor spreekuren en overleggen, dossier- en archiefbeheer, werken met het digitale patiëntendossier
• samen met twee collega’s draag je zorg voor het goed functioneren van het secretariaat van de interne arbodienst en beheert het procedurehandboek voor het secretariaat
• je bent lid van het interne Kwaliteitsteam van de arbodienst en ondersteunt actief het kwaliteitsmanagementproces (ISO 9001) ten behoeve van de certificering; je bereidt de jaarlijkse interne en externe audits voor en ondersteunt het up-to-date houden en de redactie van het kwaliteitshandboek
• het ondersteunen van de kwaliteitszorg beslaat ongeveer 1/3 van je werktijd