Are you holding Master’s degree and looking for fully funded PhD positions? Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands invites online application for multiple funded PhD Programs / fully funded PhD positions in various research areas.
Candidates interested in fully funded PhD positions can check the details and may apply as soon as possible. Interested and eligible applicants may submit their online application for PhD programs via the University’s Online Application Portal.
1. Fully Funded PhD Position in Transition towards Circular Societies
Summary of PhD Program:
The world is facing critical challenges, including climate change, biodiversity loss, excessive pollution, and resource scarcity. These systemic issues are rooted in the linear, extractive nature of resource use in present-day society. To address this, a transition to a circular society is urgently needed. But how can this transition be governed? What strategies can policymakers, businesses, and civil society use to accelerate this shift? And how can diverse actors be aligned around a shared vision of a circular future?
Application Deadline: 11 May 2025
2. Fully Funded PhD Position in Coupled Soil Carbon-Nitrogen-Phosphorus Cycles
Summary of PhD Program:
In this four-year study, you will develop a state-of-art global spatially explicit, integrated, mechanistic, coupled soil biogeochemistry model for the dynamic interconnected C-N-P cycling. This model will build on our pioneering model framework Integrated Model to Assess the Global Environment-Dynamic Global Nutrient Model (IMAGE-DGNM), which tracks the changes in climate, hydrological cycle, land cover, and human activities since the pre-industrial era. You will collect and synthesise the latest field and remote-sensing-based observation databases and reported coupled kinetics from labs and culture experiments, and use them to construct and validate the model.
Application Deadline: 5 May 2025
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3. Fully Funded PhD Position in Unravelling the Social Exposome for Better Health
Summary of PhD Program:
This PhD project aims to fill this gap by developing and validating scalable, data-driven social network models to revolutionise how we measure social exposures in health research. You will be at the forefront of an innovative and interdisciplinary research project exploring how person-level opportunity structures for social interactions can serve as proxies for social networks and how they impact health. Your work will contribute to a groundbreaking methodological framework for modeling social exposures on a massive scale.
Application Deadline: 15 May 2025
4. Fully Funded PhD Position in Transforming Streetscapes for Healthier Cities
Summary of PhD Program:
In this PhD project, you will explore how street-level built and natural environmental changes influence people’s health and health behaviour. Using a novel combination of deep learning, street view imagery, and epidemiological methods, we aim to identify the most effective urban exposure modifications. This research will generate actionable insights to guide policymakers in designing healthier urban spaces.
Application Deadline: 15 May 2025
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5. Fully Funded PhD Position in Analytical Mass Spectrometry-Based Immunopeptidomics/Proteomics
Summary of PhD Program:
This project focuses on developing highly sensitive and alternative immunopeptidomics/proteomics workflows, including sample preparation, chromatography, mass spectrometry acquisition, fragmentation, and data analysis. The goal is to enhance the detection of HLA class I and II peptides, both with and without post-translational modifications. Additionally, the project aims to optimise biochemical and bioinformatic quantitative strategies to improve the selection of HLA-bound tumour-specific antigens. You will also collaborate with laboratories within Oncode and the Princess Máxima Institute.
Application Deadline: 1 May 2025
6. Fully Funded PhD Position in Care and Responsibility for Animals and Their End of Life
Summary of PhD Program:
The importance of care for animals is receiving increasing attention from society and the veterinary profession. This includes ethical and practical challenges related to end-of-life decision-making for animals. This project builds on previous research which has shown that decision-making can be complex and lead to situations where veterinary professionals and pet owners have different perspectives on what constitutes appropriate care. These differences in perspective can have consequences for the well-being of animals, pet owners, and veterinary professionals.
Application Deadline: 23 May 2025
7. Fully Funded PhD Position in Spatial Agent-based Modelling of Policy Measures to Improve Diet Quality
Summary of PhD Program:
The pandemic of obesity and related diseases is among the most pressing problems in public health. Interventions to improve diet quality at an individual level are often ineffective in the long run, since they disregard the contextual drivers, such as our food environment, that shape dietary behaviours. Therefore, the aim of this PhD project is to assess the combined effectiveness of various policy interventions targeting the food environment on diet quality to prevent obesity and related disease risks. This assessment will be done by building, calibrating, validating, and applying a spatial agent-based model.
Application Deadline: 16 May 2025
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8. Fully Funded PhD Position in Rise of Oligarchic Tendencies in Western-European History
Summary of PhD Program:
The twentieth century saw the rise of cooperatives, mutuals, housing corporations, unions, and social organisations. While these associations fulfilled vital roles in economic, social, and cultural life, they have also been identified with increasing capture by a small subset of their members. Sometimes this is even considered to be inherent to associational organisation and labelled as an “Iron Law of Oligarchy”.
Application Deadline: 12 May 2025
9. Fully Funded PhD Position in Conceptual and Agent-based Modelling of Exposure Interventions
Summary of PhD Program:
This PhD project aims to advance spatial ABM modeling for human environmental exposure assessment in health research by addressing a key limitation: the lack of generalisable frameworks. While ABMs are uniquely suited to capturing complex human-environment interactions, current models are often developed in isolation, limiting their adaptability across different exposure scenarios. To overcome this, the project will develop a smart, adaptable spatial ABM (S-ABM) framework that translates spatial behavioral theory into practical simulation tools.
Application Deadline: 16 May 2025
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10. Fully Funded PhD Position in Mass Spectrometry Proteomics to Study Protein Lipidation Biology
Summary of PhD Program:
As a PhD candidate, you will use (primary) cells and tissues to study the role and regulation of protein lipidation in (neuro)inflammation. In this project, you will operate at the interface of biology and chemistry. Your contributions will advance the development and application of innovative chemical biology and proteomics methodologies to study the regulation of protein lipidation, with a focus on S-palmitoylation. The goal is to uncover how these modifications are regulated and influence proteins that are crucial in (neuro)inflammation.
Application Deadline: 6 May 2025
11. Fully Funded PhD Position in Adaptive Responses to Crises: Understanding Trust, Fairness, Uncertainty
Summary of PhD Program:
Trust in other people and in social institutions is critically important to the effectiveness and legitimacy of a crisis response. However, people often lack the information they need to decide whether others (including abstract entities such as institutions) can be trusted and regarded as reliable interaction partners. This lack of information becomes especially poignant in times of crisis. Furthermore, under conditions of uncertainty, fairness is an important concern. For example, people want to know whether they are being treated fairly and in a just manner by parties having power over them.
Application Deadline: 11 May 2025
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12. Fully Funded PhD Position in Adaptive Responses to Crises: Trust in Government, Science, and Law
Summary of PhD Program:
As a PhD researcher, you will examine trust in and perceived integrity of social institutions. This will involve real-life contexts regarding government, science, and law. Your studies will rely on earlier successful experiences with quantitative surveys, qualitative interviews, and other methods such as field experiments. Triangulating the findings of these different research methods you will examine the implications for the actions and repertoires of professionals acting as representatives of the institutions, including judges, police officers, and scientists.
Application Deadline: 11 May 2025
13. Fully Funded PhD Position in Climate Dynamics
Summary of PhD Program:
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and the Amazon rainforest play important roles in the Earth’s climate system. Both of these subsystems have been marked as tipping elements and global climate change seems to push both to their tipping point. While both subsystems have been studied in isolation, it is yet largely unknown how they may interact and affect each other’s tipping behaviour. For example, an AMOC collapse could redistribute rainfall across the Amazon and thereby affect its internal forest-rainfall feedback. Conversely, changes in forest cover distributions would affect the energy and water balances in the Amazon, which might affect the AMOC.
Application Deadline: 15 May 2025
14. Fully Funded PhD Position in Modelling the Evolution of the Larsen C Ice Shelf
Summary of PhD Program:
As a fully-funded four-year PhD candidate, you will study the evolution of the firn layer of the Larsen C ice shelf, Antarctica, using a combination of observations and models. You will use the IMAU firn densification model forced by high resolution output from the regional climate model RACMO to simulate the evolution of the Larsen C firn layer in the recent past (1950 to present) and into the future (up to 2100) based on different climate scenarios. You will perform the model runs, analyse the results, and compare them to firn properties estimated from (airborne) radar observations and weather station observations.
Application Deadline: 15 May 2025
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15. Fully Funded PhD Position in Causal Effects of Communication in MARL
Summary of PhD Program:
In this project, we focus on interpretability of the communication in MARL algorithms. We aim to bring together causality and multi-agent reinforcement learning, using causal methods to understand the effects of communication on MARL agents’ (learning) behaviors. This could cover better interpreting the potential causal relations between communication strategies and the learning performance, or using causal representation learning for developing more effective and interpretable MARL with communication algorithms.
Application Deadline: 20 May 2025
16. Fully Funded PhD Position in Causality-Aware Explanations for Probabilistic Graphical Models
Summary of PhD Program:
In this project, you will study uncertainty and causality in probabilistic graphical models with the goal of designing causality-aware explanations. Explanations should also be adaptable for different users who may have different views on what counts as a meaningful explanation. Your research will be part of the Hybrid Intelligence Centre external link, which aims to design systems that profit from both human and machine intelligence. This large nation-wide consortium provides you with numerous opportunities to collaborate with a diverse group of PhD candidates and more senior researchers on various challenges and use cases, both within and outside our department.
Application Deadline: 19 May 2025
17. Fully Funded PhD Position in Justifications in Human-AI Teams for Hybrid Intelligence
Summary of PhD Program:
For Hybrid Intelligence (HI) teams to function effectively, all members–human and AI alike–must be able to exhibit behaviour that accounts for and is justifiable with respect to the shared team’s ethics and team norms. In this project, you will investigate computational models and mechanisms that enable AI agents in Hybrid Human-AI teams to learn, adapt, and utilise shared team norms through interactions to ensure their actions are aligned and justifiable. This includes exploring how and when AI can provide, or request, justifications for team members’ actions based on the team norms.
