Are you holding Master’s degree and looking for fully funded PhD positions? Wageningen University & Research, Wageningen, 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 Modelling pollutant transport across the soil-atmosphere continuum
Summary of PhD Program:
In this PhD project, you will specifically focus on the environmental fate of microplastics and pesticides. Your research involves designing field campaigns for measuring soil wind erosion and dust transport and associated pollutants in two Dutch case study sites of the SOILPROM project. Using data collected, you will develop a physically based dust module within the open-source Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) MicroHH model. With this advanced model, the soil-atmosphere interface will be studied in detail to assess the impact of soil wind erosion on emission and atmospheric transport of pollutants.
Application Deadline: 2 September 2024
2. Fully Funded PhD Position in Forest Spirituality in Eastern Europe
Summary of PhD Program:
Specifically, we are looking for a PhD candidate researcher who is interested in understanding how forest spirituality plays a role in forest management, governance, and related nature conservation strategies. You will need to be open and interested in doing qualitative social science research in an interdisciplinary setting involving other researchers, forest managers, nature conservationists and other forest related stakeholders. As a PhD researcher, you will be part of the new research project: Forest Spirituality in Eastern Europe (FORESEE) and supervised by Dr. Agata Konczal and Dr. Bas Verschuuren at FNP.
Application Deadline: 2 September 2024
Follow FellowshipBard for daily updates!
3. Fully Funded PhD Position in Evolution and innovation in eukaryotic genomes
Summary of PhD Program:
We invite you to apply for a vacant PhD position in our dynamic research team. In this role, you will have the opportunity to explore the evolutionary processes driving genetic innovation in eukaryotes, such as de novo gene invention, gene fusion, and horizontal gene transfer. The emergence of the complex eukaryotic cell, which gave rise to infamous lineages like plants, animals and fungi, comprises one of the major outstanding questions in evolutionary biology. The past decade has brought large progress in identifying the prokaryotic origins of eukaryotes. In this development, our group discovered the Asgard archaea, eukaryotes’ closest prokaryotic relatives, marking an important inflection point.
Application Deadline: 31 October 2024
4. Fully Funded PhD Position in Advancing Forest Inventories in Small EU Countries Using Field Data and Multi-Source Remote Sensing
Summary of PhD Program:
Team Sustainable Forest Ecosystems and the Laboratory of Geo-information Science and Remote Sensing (GRS) at Wageningen University and Research are jointly looking for an aspiring PhD to explore the potential of advancing forest inventories in small EU countries using field data and multi-source remote sensing. Improving the accuracy and completeness of national forest inventories (NFI) of small EU countries faces challenges due to their diverse forests (species, management), limited sampling and resources. With upcoming monitoring legislation demanding annual reports, the focus is on reducing uncertainties, incorporating additional forest variables and moving towards higher (supporting) map resolutions.
Application Deadline: 9 September 2024
Find Fully Funded PhD in UK
5. Fully Funded PhD Position in small RNA inheritance in plants
Summary of PhD Program:
In addition to genetic information hard coded in DNA sequences, parents can chemically modify their chromatin to record information acquired during their life, and then transmit this epigenetic information to their progeny. Although such epigenetic inheritance challenges textbook views of inheritance and has important implications for evolution, agriculture and human health, the mechanisms of this atypical mode of inheritance have mostly remained elusive.
Application Deadline: 30 September 2024
6. Fully Funded PhD Position in Phylogenomics of plant defence plasticity to insect attack
Summary of PhD Program:
Plants respond to insect attack by mobilizing defences that specifically target the current attacker. How this response limits or provides opportunities to deal with future attack and how plants account for future risks will be the focus of your research. Your task is to mine genomic data to reveal phylogenomic patterns in signaling pathways underlying defence responses against insect herbivores within diverse plant species of the Brassicaceae family. Your project seeks to link ecological interactions with molecular defence mechanisms through comparative genomics by focusing on gene presence-absence variations, copy number changes, and visualizing synteny and structural rearrangements across multiple genomes.
Application Deadline: 8 September 2024
7. Fully Funded PhD Position in Regenerating labour in food provisioning
Summary of PhD Program:
Research indicates that the neoliberal restructuring of the agricultural and food system, along with globalization and technological intensification, may compromise the position of workers. Many employees in the agricultural and food sector have found themselves in precarious circumstances. Empirical studies demonstrate that the effects of globalization and technological intensification are particularly challenging for employees with vocational training, women, young people, and employees with a migration background. There is still a need for more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between regenerative agricultural and food processing practices and working conditions, as well as the overall quality of work.
Application Deadline: 16 September 2024
Find Fully Funded PhD in USA
8. Fully Funded PhD Position in Quality of farm labour and new organizational arrangements
Summary of PhD Program:
Regenerative agriculture is leading to a greater variety of farming practices, which is prompting changes in the organization, quality, and compensation of farm labour. This includes the introduction of new pension schemes, farm succession plans, and new multifunctionality and community cooperative arrangements (Zoöps). However, not much is known about how these new organizational structures impact the continuity, quality, and compensation of farm labour. Do these new organizational arrangements make farm labour more appealing? In what ways? What factors contribute to making farm labour attractive and accessible? And how does this relate to new organizational arrangements and succession plans? Over the next decade, half of the farms in the Netherlands will need to address succession, and more than half have not yet identified a successor. What new collective succession plans are emerging?
Application Deadline: 16 September 2024
9. Fully Funded PhD Position in Mitochondrial dysfunction-derived lipid droplet accumulation promotes atrial fibrillation in diabetes
Summary of PhD Program:
Do you have a strong interest and background in academic research in the field of cardiac and metabolic health? Are you interested in experimental molecular physiological research to generate mechanistic knowledge on the role of mitochondrial dysfunction and lipid droplets in arrhythmogenesis leading to atrial fibrillation in patients with diabetes, and using multiple systems to test potential compounds to prevent cardiac arrhythmia in diabetes? Then this position as PhD candidate at the chair group Human and Animal Physiology may be of interest to you.
Application Deadline: September 16th, 2024
Find Fully Funded PhD in Europe
10. Fully Funded PhD Position in Environmental modulation of protein mobility in land plants
Summary of PhD Program:
As a successful candidate, you will investigate protein movement across cells in Arabidopsis leaves under shade-like conditions, using both targeted and untargeted multi-omics methodologies. Fluorescent tags that allow (GFP) or hamper (3xGFP) protein mobility will track the functionality of specific mobile proteins. Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) coupled with single-cell proteomics will help identify the specific cells in which these genes are transcribed and map proteins that move across cell layers. Integrating proteomic data with scRNA-seq results will help build a comprehensive map of protein dynamics and regulatory networks at the single-cell, particularly in the context of shade-avoidance signalling.
Application Deadline: 16 September 2024
11. Fully Funded PhD Position in Quantifying the dependence of natural ecosystems on pollinators
Summary of PhD Program:
While there is a fairly good understanding of the negative consequences of pollinator declines for crops, we know much less about the consequences for wild plant communities. These communities are thought to be relatively resilient to changes in pollinator communities because they comprise many different species that may show different responses. However, knowledge of how ecological interactions between plants and pollinators influence the resilience of ecosystems to environmental perturbations is largely theoretical. Using a combination of empirical fieldwork and pollinator-dependent plant population models this PhD project aims to determine how plant communities respond to changes in pollinator communities.
Application Deadline: 9 September 2024
Explore PhD Salary, Jobs, & Career Growth
12. Fully Funded PhD Position in lipid metabolism engineering in microalgae
Summary of PhD Program:
As a part of a European project, we are seeking a highly motivated and skilled early-stage scientist to join our highly dynamic team as a PhD candidate. The successful candidate will play a critical role in advancing our research and development efforts in the field of microalgae lipid metabolism engineering and photosynthesis, and will have the opportunity to join a highly exciting international European consortium and team. This position requires a strong foundation in molecular engineering, metabolic pathway analysis, and synthetic biology, along with hands-on experience in bioreactor operations.
Application Deadline: 15 October 2024
13. Fully Funded PhD Position in computational pangenomics
Summary of PhD Program:
In bioinformatics, traditional approaches to compare genomes, centered on a single reference, no longer suffice when faced with hundreds to thousands of genomes. The field of genomics is therefore switching to so-called pangenomics. PanTools is a platform developed in the Bioinformatics Group that uniquely integrates a sequence-based and a gene-based pangenome representation. Resting on a compacted De Bruijn graph sequence representation, PanTools has been extended with functions to accommodate comparative genomic analyses at different levels of genomic organization, from genes to gene clusters and syntenic regions.
Application Deadline: 2 September 2024
14. Fully Funded PhD Position in Economic value of pollination in crop value chains
Summary of PhD Program:
Within the Business Economics group of Wageningen University a position for a PhD student has become available which assesses the dependence of the economy and society on pollinators and evaluates strategies to increase the resilience of value chains against pollinator losses in food, feed, bio-based materials, energy and medical supply chains. The project is embedded in the EU Horizon project VALues and dependence of society on pollinatORs (VALOR).
Application Deadline: 16 September 2024
Explore Our Career Blog
15. Fully Funded PhD Position in Innovative spatial planning mechanisms to control nutrient emissions in the Netherlands
Summary of PhD Program:
Designing such systems, however, requires crucial decisions about how large the cap should be, how rights to pollute get distributed among actors, and at which spatial scale (e.g., provincial, national) the system should work. This in turn calls for an in-depth knowledge of farmers’ preferences and behavioral response to economic incentives. In your PhD, you will dive deep into these considerations and develop an agent-based model (ABM) that simulates the behavior of multiple agents under such systems, helping us assess the comprehensive effects of the above-mentioned design aspects on nutrient pollution and biodiversity conservation.
Application Deadline: 16 September 2024
16. Fully Funded PhD Position in GreenTE
Summary of PhD Program:
This PhD project is part of the Gravitation programme GreenTE (Green Tissue Engineering), a multidisciplinary consortium of 7 Dutch universities. Together, GreenTE will unravel how plants sense and respond to mechanical stimuli. These fundamental insights will be the basis to develop engineering interventions to improve plant regeneration, seed germination and defenses against disease. The successful applicant will be an integral member of the GreenTE community, which offers an open, diverse and inspiring environment to engage in multidisciplinary mechanobiology research at the intersection of biology, chemistry and physics, and is expected to participate in GreenTE events, training and collaborations.
Application Deadline: 2 September 2024
17. Fully Funded PhD Position in Optimizing lactation length for dairy cows
Summary of PhD Program:
Extending the lactation length of dairy cows will reduce the frequency of calving moments in a cow’s life and may herewith improve cow health. Risk of an extended lactation is that part of the cows gains too much body weight during the end of the extended lactation, associated with increased health risks in the subsequent lactation. Recently, Wageningen University finished a research project (see project page (in Dutch): Lactatie op Maat (verantwoordeveehouderij.nl); and PhD thesis) where animal-specific characteristics were identified that determine an individual cow’s response to an extended lactation. In the current research project, these cow characteristics will be used to build decision support models to optimize lactation length.
Application Deadline: 2 September 2024
18. Fully Funded PhD Position in Climate resilience and conservation of species interactions in a changing world
Summary of PhD Program:
The Plant Ecology and Nature Conservation Group at Wageningen University is looking for an aspiring PhD to explore how anthropogenic pressures on biotic interactions affect species distributions and, consequently, biodiversity. As a PhD candidate, you will be working with one of the world’s most threatened plant families – Orchidaceae – as a model species group, and their interactions with mycorrhizal fungi as model biotic interactions.
Application Deadline: 9 September 2024
10 Best AI Cover Letter Builders
19. Fully Funded PhD Position in Inter- and intra-specific crop flower variation for pollinator-friendly farming systems
Summary of PhD Program:
Intensive agriculture is one of the main pressures on biodiversity in agricultural landscapes, even though much of the agricultural production depends on this biodiversity for yield. For example, many agricultural crops depend on insects for crop pollination, and with a transition to more plant-based diets this is expected to increase in the future. We therefore need to develop more pollinator-friendly farming systems. At present, intensive agricultural crop fields generally consist of a single cultivar of a crop species, which are bred for the highest response to agricultural inputs such as fertilizer or pesticide resistance, while the contribution of insect pollination is usually undervalued.
Application Deadline: 9 September 2024
20. Fully Funded PhD Position in Genetic and spatial biology of viruses in plant-feeding nematodes
Summary of PhD Program:
As a PhD candidate in this project you will perform and analyze experiments that contain a combination microbiology, molecular biology and next-generation sequencing techniques (e.g. RNA- and Tomo-seq). Specifically, you will localize different viruses in two important plant-parasitic nematode species, map nematode genes involved in infection and may discover viral genes involved in immune suppression. Thereby, you will contribute fundamental understanding of the genetic and spatial interactions between plant-parasitic nematodes and their viruses.
Application Deadline: 2 September 2024
21. Fully Funded PhD Position in Animal Health and Welfare in Regenerative Agriculture
Summary of PhD Program:
This PhD will be one of 19 PhDs being recruited over the next 3 years, to support the monitoring, modelling and valuing of regenerative farms in the Netherlands. This large-scale transdisciplinary project (ReGeNL) will assess which combinations of practices are adopted/recommended for 8 different types of regenerative agriculture systems. The project aims to be an accelerator for the transition to a regenerative, profitable and socially supported agricultural sector. As part of this project, we will monitor and model a range of different regenerative agricultural systems to understand which combinations of practices work for a range of agricultural, socio-economic and environmental outcomes.
Application Deadline: 2 September 2024
22. Fully Funded PhD Position in Economic resilience of regenerative agriculture
Summary of PhD Program:
This PhD will be based within the Animal Production Systems group, in collaboration with the Wageningen Economic Research. During this project you will be involved in farm visits and on-farm data collection. This PhD will work alongside other PhDs within the ReGeNL project all aimed to better understand the synergies and trade-offs of regenerative practices.
Application Deadline: 2 September 2024
23. Fully Funded PhD Position in Circular Practices to prevent single-use material consumption in Hospitals
Summary of PhD Program:
In this work package we investigate: (i) how protocols in hospitals lead to unsustainable material use in ICU units and operating theatres; (ii) current working practices of hospital professionals in these units; (iii) drivers for sustainable behaviour; and (iv) testing and evaluating interventions in ICU units and operating theatres. In this PhD track, the focus is on the investigation of (institutionalized and implemented) practices around single-use material use in the workplace (steps i and ii). A PhD candidate at Erasmus University will particularly focus on the behavioural interventions (iii and iv). The fieldwork is mainly qualitative in nature: participatory observation in hospitals, semi-structured interviews, focus-groups and co-creation sessions.
Application Deadline: 2 September 2024
24. Fully Funded PhD Position in Understanding farmer decision making to reduce risks from pesticides
Summary of PhD Program:
The Business Economics Group at Wageningen University is looking for a PhD student to contribute to their research on effective approaches for mitigating risks to the environment from pesticides in a European context. The successful candidate will investigate pesticide decision-making processes of farmers, with a focus on both individual and collective approaches and their interrelation with other risk management decisions. Additionally, they will investigate the shift of decisions to external units such as environmental cooperatives, pesticides contractors, and other initiatives to coordinate joint pesticide spraying efforts.
Application Deadline: 2 September 2024
25. Fully Funded PhD Position in Modelling the wind-driven emission and transport of microplastics in the atmosphere
Summary of PhD Program:
The two chair groups Meteorology and Air Quality (MAQ) and Soil Physics and Land Management (SLM) of Wageningen University are hiring a joint PhD candidate for a 4-year project on atmospheric microplastics. The project aims to understand the fundamental processes that govern the emissions of microplastics from soil and their subsequent atmospheric transport. The PhD project involves not only the direct numerical simulation (DNS) modelling using the MicroHH model, but also experimental analysis with different plastic polymers/shapes in the laboratory and wind tunnel. Specifically, you will measure some key physical parameters like the threshold friction velocity and settling velocity of microplastics and extract microplastics from dust samples by chemical analysis.
Application Deadline: 9 September 2024
26. Fully Funded PhD Position in Empowering optimal design for greater resilience of the electricity grid
Summary of PhD Program:
In this project, a resilience assessment framework for electricity grids will first be developed, building on resilience theory and interdisciplinary methods in ecology and economics (e.g., the five Ws). Since energy systems can be modeled as networked systems, we will employ spatial and network analysis; where nodes represent components like substations and consumers, edges represent connections between them such as transmission lines, and network metrics can be used to identify critical components in the systems.
Application Deadline: 2 September 2024
27. Fully Funded PhD Position in AI-powered identification of anomalies and manipulation in electricity markets
Summary of PhD Program:
You will collaborate with a diverse group of national and international researchers in energy systems, markets, statistics, and information technology, within the HighLO project, alongside stakeholders from the Dutch and European energy regulation institutes (e.g., ACM and ACER). The HighLO project is partnership between Wageningen University & Research and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Our goal is to use particle physics tools and methodologies to identify malicious trading behavior in commodity markets to better protect markets and consumers.
Application Deadline: 15 September 2024
28. Fully Funded PhD Position in Sweet spot: spot-on usage of non-nutritive sweeteners
Summary of PhD Program:
The division of Human Nutrition and Health has an opening to conduct research on the impact of non-nutrive sweeteners on physiology, metabolism and the microbiome. As a PhD student you will be managing a controlled dietary intervention trial within the Human Research Unit of the Division of Human Nutrition and Health, analyse the data and write peer reviewed papers on the outcomes of the trial.
