The Department of Child Development and Education is looking for a PhD candidate for the VICI-project, entitled ‘When mummy and daddy get under your skin’. A new look at how parenting affects children’s stress reactivity and disruptive behaviour’. The project will be supervised by prof. dr. Geertjan Overbeek and dr. Loes van Rijn-van Gelderen.

Project description

Child maltreatment is a widespread, global phenomenon that affects the lives of millions of children all over the world. In children who experience chronic maltreatment or highly dysfunctional caregiving, stress reactivity is significantly upregulated, towards hyperarousal, vigilance and alertness. The stressful parenting environment may be related to epigenetic signatures in children. Specifically, dysfunctional parenting predicts methylation (gene silencing) in a glucocorticoid gene pathway responsible for heightened stress reactivity and disruptive behaviour in children. How can we undo this process? This project focuses on the hypothesis that by improving parenting with known-effective parenting interventions, previously methylated gene pathways that are responsible for impaired stress reactivity can become demethylated―leading to improved stress reactivity that prevents or diminishes children’s disruptive behaviour. This hypothesis will be examined in an experimental research paradigm (i.e., a randomized controlled trial) among at-risk children (aged 12-14 months) and their families in the Amsterdam SARPHATI cohort. The project is unique in that it pairs (epi)genetic and physiological data with observational and questionnaire data on parent-child interactions in a randomized controlled trials of VIPP-SD; a known-effective parenting intervention.

Tasks

• Participation in the PhD-programme of the Graduate School of Child Development and Education and RPA Yield;
• independently carrying out research, writing scientific articles, and completing a PhD dissertation within four or five years;
• active participation in the programme group of Preventive Youth Care, and the Research Institute of Child Development and Education;
• participating in conferences, workshops, seminars, and other scholarly activities.

The PhD candidate should have the following credentials:

• graduated with excellent results on a research-based Research Master or Master thesis in (Ortho)Pedagogics, Psychology, or a closely related discipline;
• interest in child development, and how we can use knowledge from psychology and pedagogics to help children flourish;
• experience in carrying out quantitative research and analyses;
• excellent communication and academic writing skills (Dutch and English);
• excellent organization and project coordination skills;
• experience in working with parents and children;
• knowledge of/interest in parent-child interactions, stress reactivity, and (epi)gene-environment interplay in childhood;
• knowledge of/interest in family interventions and parent training programmes.

The appointment will be for a period of 12 months plus a further 36 or 48 months (depending on either a 0.8 fte/1.0 fte appointment) contingent on a satisfactory performance during the first year. Intended start date for the project is 3 September 2018.

The gross monthly salary will range from €2,222 in the first year to €2,840 in the final year, based on a full-time position of 38 hours per week, plus 8% holiday allowance and 8,3% end-of- year allowance, in conformity with the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities.

University of Amsterdam

With over 5,000 employees, 30,000 students and a budget of more than 600 million euros, the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is an intellectual hub within the Netherlands. Teaching and research at the UvA are conducted within seven faculties: Humanities, Social and Behavioural Sciences, Economics and Business, Law, Science, Medicine and Dentistry. Housed on four city campuses in or near the heart of Amsterdam, where disciplines come together and interact, the faculties have close links with thousands of researchers and hundreds of institutions at home and abroad.   The UvA’s students and employees are independent thinkers, competent rebels who dare to question dogmas and aren’t satisfied with easy answers and standard solutions. To work at the UvA is to work in an independent, creative, innovative and international climate characterised by an open atmosphere and a genuine engagement with the city of Amsterdam and society.

http://www.uva.nl/en/home

Department of Child Development and Education

The Department of Child Development and Education is one of the departments in the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences (FMG). Staff of the department participate in the College of Child Development and Education (bachelor’s programmes), the Graduate School of Child Development and Education (master’s programmes and graduate programme) and in the Research Institute of Child Development and Education. At this institute, fundamental research is conducted in the field of child development and education. The Research Institute also participates in Research Priority Area Yield with multidisciplinary research on the bioecology of human development.

The candidate will work with the programme group Preventive Youth Care, led by prof. dr. Geertjan Overbeek.

http://www.uva.nl/en/disciplines/child-development-and-education