4 Interdisciplinary PhD Scholarships Young Academy Groningen
4 Interdisciplinary PhD Scholarships Young Academy Groningen
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Job description
We are looking for talented students who wish to design their own PhD research project on an interdisciplinary topic within the scope of Young Academy Groningen members (please visit http://www.rug.nl/research/young-academy). Five Projects and their qualifications are listed below. Applicants are strongly advised to contact the potential supervisors for each project before applying.
As a PhD scholarship student, you will develop your own research project in consultation with the associated supervisor(s). You will conduct independent and original scientific research, report results via peer-reviewed publications, conference presentations, and ultimately a PhD thesis. The PhD thesis has to be completed within four years. Being part of a cutting-edge research programme, you will receive training in the form of hands-on instruction, advanced courses, summer/winter schools, as well as complementary workshops on generic research and transferable skills. Special attention is paid to training activities directed towards your future (academic or non-academic) career after the PhD trajectory, in the context of our Career Perspective Series.
Projects:
Project 1: Understanding of how different aspects of the social environment have an impact on mental wellbeing.
The quantity and quality of social relationships people have are key in explaining their wellbeing. This is why several disciplines have engaged with this topic, each developing specific methodologies to understand (parts of) the social environment. Recently, tools based on big data approaches have been developed that can shed yet a different light on the social environment. Mobile phone apps allow getting a detailed glimpse of the social behaviour of individuals without the need for self-report. Big data collected from mobile phones provide a unique way to measure human behaviour in natural environments on a fine-grained scale, but lack information on which relationships and interactions are considered pleasant. In this project, the candidate will take a first step in combining insights from different disciplines and multimodal data (e.g., big data from apps) to characterise individual social behaviour, its social environment and effect on wellbeing.
Interdisciplinary Supervising team Project 1:
Laura Bringmann, https://www.rug.nl/staff/l.f.bringmann/cv
Gert Stulp, https://www.gertstulp.com/
Martien Kas, https://www.rug.nl/staff/m.j.h.kas/cv?lang=en
Project 2: Fostering neighbourhoods by managing social norms: wielding the power adaptive nudges
As key components of cities, neighborhoods are essential for people’s wellbeing. These are the places where a large part of everyday life unfolds, and affect, for instance, the sense of community, feelings of safety and the level of social support among residents (Galster, 2019). Through social and spatial policies and interventions, urban planners aim to promote the well-being of neighbourhood communities. However, many of these policies and interventions are based on the largely out-dated rational “actor model”. We know for instance that residents do not just consciously avoid bad property maintenance or littering because they want to avoid fines, but mostly because they intuitively sense such actions would be socially inappropriate (Cialdini, Kallgren & Reno, 1991). Which specific actions they consider inappropriate, in turn, is a function of the local social norm (Fornara, Carrus, Passafarro & Bonnes, 2011). Therefore, this project aims to explore how urban planners may be able to foster well-being in neighborhoods more effectively by generating, speeding up, or halting the spread of organically emerging local norms.
Incorporating insights from social psychology into urban planning, this PhD project is meant to kick-start a behavioural approach to neighbourhood development. It aims to explore how planners can manage shifting norms by shaping the choice context in which residents make decisions through nudging. With a mixed method approach based on lab and field experiments, the PhD will investigate how (the structuring of) space, (information about) the behaviour of others, and (the framing of) rules impact (shifting) perceptions of local norms, and in particular at which point in time and place such interventions are most effective. The project will also explore how these nudges can be co-designed with residents and which additional knowledge and skills professionals need to fully incorporate nudging in their toolbox.
Interdisciplinary Supervising Team Project 2:
Ward Rauws (Faculty of Spatial Sciences) https://www.rug.nl/staff/w.s.rauws/
Jan Willem Bolderdijk (Faculty Economics and Business) https://www.rug.nl/staff/j.w.bolderdijk/?lang=en
Project 3: Understanding Ancient Greek gods through Natural Language Processing
An accurate view of culture, mentalities and values in the Ancient Greek world hinges on the correct interpretation of key concepts in the Greek language. Here, many challenges remain. Scholars are faced with difficulties in understanding key-terms and how they potentially changed throughout history. What did a Greek speaker really mean by words like ‘justice’ or ‘courage’? Analyses done by classicists and ancient historians are invaluable, but also time-consuming, and outcomes may be biased by researchers’ previous knowledge.
Computational semantic tools, more precisely word embeddings, provide a powerful way of understanding the meaning of words, both in a synchronic and diachronic setting. This PhD-project will apply natural language processing tools to the study of Ancient Greek word usage. Ancient Greek provides a prime laboratory for such an investigation: nearly all available sources for this language have been very well digitized, the corpus is large, spans a wide diachronic period, and is enriched with layers of linguistic annotation to facilitate analysis.
Specifically, word embeddings will be used to help tackle a current major problem in the study of Ancient Greek religion: the ‘semantics’ of gods. Ancient Greek polytheism is difficult to grasp, despite much work in the field (cf. for good introductions: Parker 2005: 387-395, Parker 2011: 64-104). How did the Ancient Greeks understand their gods? The answers to this question are not static. Changing politics and increasing intercultural contacts went hand in hand with changing views of gods. The evolution of roles of gods is not a random process, but may be seen as cases of successfully anchored innovations.
New methods for studying Greek gods are a must. This PhD-project will use natural language processing (NLP) tools to better understand Greek gods synchronically and diachronically. It will focus on individual gods, through an analysis of their names, in larger datasets than can be investigated through the traditional method of close-reading.
The work done in the PhD project will serve as a methodological and practical blueprint for future large-scale analyses in Classics. An outcome of the project should be an easy-to-use interface for classicists and historians, who can leverage NLP tools to answer their own questions. This project will also yield methodological guidelines for answering research questions in Classics through NLP.
Interdisciplinary Supervising Team Project 3:
Saskia Peels (Ancient Greek) https://www.rug.nl/staff/s.peels/
Malvina Nissim (Computational Linguistics) https://www.rug.nl/staff/m.nissim/?lang=en
Project 4: Sustainable fashion: Innovation and adoption of new materials
The classical concept of a man-made material – solid, persistent, resistant to change, and functional only through its integration into a device or structure – contrasts completely with nature’s approach. Living materials adapt and change in structure and composition continuously when in use. Their function is encoded in their structure; In nature, the material is the device itself. Drawing inspiration from nature to design autonomous materials thus constitutes a radically new approach.
In fact, some entrepreneurs are working on using living materials, such as fungal mycelium or algae, as alternative material in the fashion industry that could transform the industry to be much more sustainable. However, in order to meet this goal, consumers need to be willing to adopt these new materials. This is not easy as we know that the majority of new products actually fail in the marketplace. The goal of this project is to understand what is keeping consumers from adapting new materials, and to use this information to improve the materials and their use. When it is clear what consumers perceive as weaknesses, we can use this to improve the adoption of these materials.
Interdisciplinary Supervising Team Project 4:
Marleen Kamperman (FSE) https://www.rug.nl/staff/marleen.kamperman/
Marijke Leliveld (FEB) https://www.rug.nl/staff/m.c.leliveld/
Project 5: A PhD Project that crosses the disciplines of at least one Young Academy Groningen member and one researcher from a different Faculty
If you have your own project idea that you would like to submit that is not mentioned above, please contact YAG members to discuss your ideas and the possibilities of submitting a joint proposal. (Note: This cross-disciplinary project must list at least two supervisors, of whom one is a Young Academy Groningen member).
For more information about the project(s)
It is highly recommended to contact the Young Academy members stated above to discuss the project.
As a PhD scholarship student, you will develop your own research project in consultation with the associated supervisor(s). You will conduct independent and original scientific research, report results via peer-reviewed publications, conference presentations, and ultimately a PhD thesis. The PhD thesis has to be completed within four years. Being part of a cutting-edge research programme, you will receive training in the form of hands-on instruction, advanced courses, summer/winter schools, as well as complementary workshops on generic research and transferable skills. Special attention is paid to training activities directed towards your future (academic or non-academic) career after the PhD trajectory, in the context of our Career Perspective Series.
Projects:
Project 1: Understanding of how different aspects of the social environment have an impact on mental wellbeing.
The quantity and quality of social relationships people have are key in explaining their wellbeing. This is why several disciplines have engaged with this topic, each developing specific methodologies to understand (parts of) the social environment. Recently, tools based on big data approaches have been developed that can shed yet a different light on the social environment. Mobile phone apps allow getting a detailed glimpse of the social behaviour of individuals without the need for self-report. Big data collected from mobile phones provide a unique way to measure human behaviour in natural environments on a fine-grained scale, but lack information on which relationships and interactions are considered pleasant. In this project, the candidate will take a first step in combining insights from different disciplines and multimodal data (e.g., big data from apps) to characterise individual social behaviour, its social environment and effect on wellbeing.
Interdisciplinary Supervising team Project 1:
Laura Bringmann, https://www.rug.nl/staff/l.f.bringmann/cv
Gert Stulp, https://www.gertstulp.com/
Martien Kas, https://www.rug.nl/staff/m.j.h.kas/cv?lang=en
Project 2: Fostering neighbourhoods by managing social norms: wielding the power adaptive nudges
As key components of cities, neighborhoods are essential for people’s wellbeing. These are the places where a large part of everyday life unfolds, and affect, for instance, the sense of community, feelings of safety and the level of social support among residents (Galster, 2019). Through social and spatial policies and interventions, urban planners aim to promote the well-being of neighbourhood communities. However, many of these policies and interventions are based on the largely out-dated rational “actor model”. We know for instance that residents do not just consciously avoid bad property maintenance or littering because they want to avoid fines, but mostly because they intuitively sense such actions would be socially inappropriate (Cialdini, Kallgren & Reno, 1991). Which specific actions they consider inappropriate, in turn, is a function of the local social norm (Fornara, Carrus, Passafarro & Bonnes, 2011). Therefore, this project aims to explore how urban planners may be able to foster well-being in neighborhoods more effectively by generating, speeding up, or halting the spread of organically emerging local norms.
Incorporating insights from social psychology into urban planning, this PhD project is meant to kick-start a behavioural approach to neighbourhood development. It aims to explore how planners can manage shifting norms by shaping the choice context in which residents make decisions through nudging. With a mixed method approach based on lab and field experiments, the PhD will investigate how (the structuring of) space, (information about) the behaviour of others, and (the framing of) rules impact (shifting) perceptions of local norms, and in particular at which point in time and place such interventions are most effective. The project will also explore how these nudges can be co-designed with residents and which additional knowledge and skills professionals need to fully incorporate nudging in their toolbox.
Interdisciplinary Supervising Team Project 2:
Ward Rauws (Faculty of Spatial Sciences) https://www.rug.nl/staff/w.s.rauws/
Jan Willem Bolderdijk (Faculty Economics and Business) https://www.rug.nl/staff/j.w.bolderdijk/?lang=en
Project 3: Understanding Ancient Greek gods through Natural Language Processing
An accurate view of culture, mentalities and values in the Ancient Greek world hinges on the correct interpretation of key concepts in the Greek language. Here, many challenges remain. Scholars are faced with difficulties in understanding key-terms and how they potentially changed throughout history. What did a Greek speaker really mean by words like ‘justice’ or ‘courage’? Analyses done by classicists and ancient historians are invaluable, but also time-consuming, and outcomes may be biased by researchers’ previous knowledge.
Computational semantic tools, more precisely word embeddings, provide a powerful way of understanding the meaning of words, both in a synchronic and diachronic setting. This PhD-project will apply natural language processing tools to the study of Ancient Greek word usage. Ancient Greek provides a prime laboratory for such an investigation: nearly all available sources for this language have been very well digitized, the corpus is large, spans a wide diachronic period, and is enriched with layers of linguistic annotation to facilitate analysis.
Specifically, word embeddings will be used to help tackle a current major problem in the study of Ancient Greek religion: the ‘semantics’ of gods. Ancient Greek polytheism is difficult to grasp, despite much work in the field (cf. for good introductions: Parker 2005: 387-395, Parker 2011: 64-104). How did the Ancient Greeks understand their gods? The answers to this question are not static. Changing politics and increasing intercultural contacts went hand in hand with changing views of gods. The evolution of roles of gods is not a random process, but may be seen as cases of successfully anchored innovations.
New methods for studying Greek gods are a must. This PhD-project will use natural language processing (NLP) tools to better understand Greek gods synchronically and diachronically. It will focus on individual gods, through an analysis of their names, in larger datasets than can be investigated through the traditional method of close-reading.
The work done in the PhD project will serve as a methodological and practical blueprint for future large-scale analyses in Classics. An outcome of the project should be an easy-to-use interface for classicists and historians, who can leverage NLP tools to answer their own questions. This project will also yield methodological guidelines for answering research questions in Classics through NLP.
Interdisciplinary Supervising Team Project 3:
Saskia Peels (Ancient Greek) https://www.rug.nl/staff/s.peels/
Malvina Nissim (Computational Linguistics) https://www.rug.nl/staff/m.nissim/?lang=en
Project 4: Sustainable fashion: Innovation and adoption of new materials
The classical concept of a man-made material – solid, persistent, resistant to change, and functional only through its integration into a device or structure – contrasts completely with nature’s approach. Living materials adapt and change in structure and composition continuously when in use. Their function is encoded in their structure; In nature, the material is the device itself. Drawing inspiration from nature to design autonomous materials thus constitutes a radically new approach.
In fact, some entrepreneurs are working on using living materials, such as fungal mycelium or algae, as alternative material in the fashion industry that could transform the industry to be much more sustainable. However, in order to meet this goal, consumers need to be willing to adopt these new materials. This is not easy as we know that the majority of new products actually fail in the marketplace. The goal of this project is to understand what is keeping consumers from adapting new materials, and to use this information to improve the materials and their use. When it is clear what consumers perceive as weaknesses, we can use this to improve the adoption of these materials.
Interdisciplinary Supervising Team Project 4:
Marleen Kamperman (FSE) https://www.rug.nl/staff/marleen.kamperman/
Marijke Leliveld (FEB) https://www.rug.nl/staff/m.c.leliveld/
Project 5: A PhD Project that crosses the disciplines of at least one Young Academy Groningen member and one researcher from a different Faculty
If you have your own project idea that you would like to submit that is not mentioned above, please contact YAG members to discuss your ideas and the possibilities of submitting a joint proposal. (Note: This cross-disciplinary project must list at least two supervisors, of whom one is a Young Academy Groningen member).
For more information about the project(s)
It is highly recommended to contact the Young Academy members stated above to discuss the project.
Specifications
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University of Groningen
Requirements
Qualifications Project 1 (Understanding of how different aspects of the social environment have an impact on mental wellbeing):
• You should foremost be interested in the combination of content and methodology and enjoy working in different labs and departments, interacting with a variety of people and disciplines.
• You have a background in statistics/quantitative social sciences/psychometrics/computer science and ideally have a (research) Masters in one of these areas. A strong affinity to research on wellbeing is desired.
• You ideally have experience with statistical programming with R and/or python. This project involves working with different types of non-standard datasets (longitudinal experience sampling method data, personal network data, and big data from mobile phone apps).
• Affinity with reproducible workflows is further considered advantageous.
Qualifications Project 2 (Fostering neighbourhoods by managing social norms: wielding the power adaptive nudges):
The ideal candidate has:
• A (Research) Master degree in environmental psychology, social psychology, sociology, behavioral economics or a related discipline.
• Expertise with mixed-methods, ranging from qualitative (interviews) to quantitative (lab experiments), and should be open to learn additional methods (e.g. computer simulations to model social interactions).
• A fascination for and/or experience with neighborhood communities and their daily practices and problems, and is eager to work with urban planners and citizens.
Qualifications Project 3 (Understanding Ancient Greek gods through Natural Language Processing):
The ideal candidate has:
• A Research MA, MA or MPhil degree in Classics, held by time of appointment (Sept. 1, 2020), with an MA thesis of high quality with a grade of at least 8.0 on a ten-point scale, or comparable assessment.
• Excellent philological skills in Ancient Greek.
• Strong affinity with the field of computational linguistics / Natural Language Processing, including the willingness to learn.
• Well-developed research and writing skills, independent thinker.
• Excellent competence in English, as well as reading competence in French, German, and Italian.
• Ability to work in an organized manner, respecting deadlines; team player.
Qualifications Project 4 (Sustainable fashion: Innovation and adoption of new materials):
• The ideal candidate has a strong background in materials science (MSc chemistry, chemical engineering, materials science, or related field) with a strong interest in business.
• Alternatively, we are interested in recruiting entrepreneurs that are active in living materials start-ups. These existing initiatives may need scientific support on different levels and stages in the value chain and a PhD trajectory could be an interesting option.
Qualifications Project 5 (A PhD Project that crosses the disciplines of at least one Young Academy Groningen member and one researcher from a different Faculty):
• The ideal candidate is ambitious, highly motivated and wishes to make a career in research. He or she has a thorough training in research skills, speaks and writes English fluently, and has considerable experience in the project area being proposed (ideally at Masters level).
• You should foremost be interested in the combination of content and methodology and enjoy working in different labs and departments, interacting with a variety of people and disciplines.
• You have a background in statistics/quantitative social sciences/psychometrics/computer science and ideally have a (research) Masters in one of these areas. A strong affinity to research on wellbeing is desired.
• You ideally have experience with statistical programming with R and/or python. This project involves working with different types of non-standard datasets (longitudinal experience sampling method data, personal network data, and big data from mobile phone apps).
• Affinity with reproducible workflows is further considered advantageous.
Qualifications Project 2 (Fostering neighbourhoods by managing social norms: wielding the power adaptive nudges):
The ideal candidate has:
• A (Research) Master degree in environmental psychology, social psychology, sociology, behavioral economics or a related discipline.
• Expertise with mixed-methods, ranging from qualitative (interviews) to quantitative (lab experiments), and should be open to learn additional methods (e.g. computer simulations to model social interactions).
• A fascination for and/or experience with neighborhood communities and their daily practices and problems, and is eager to work with urban planners and citizens.
Qualifications Project 3 (Understanding Ancient Greek gods through Natural Language Processing):
The ideal candidate has:
• A Research MA, MA or MPhil degree in Classics, held by time of appointment (Sept. 1, 2020), with an MA thesis of high quality with a grade of at least 8.0 on a ten-point scale, or comparable assessment.
• Excellent philological skills in Ancient Greek.
• Strong affinity with the field of computational linguistics / Natural Language Processing, including the willingness to learn.
• Well-developed research and writing skills, independent thinker.
• Excellent competence in English, as well as reading competence in French, German, and Italian.
• Ability to work in an organized manner, respecting deadlines; team player.
Qualifications Project 4 (Sustainable fashion: Innovation and adoption of new materials):
• The ideal candidate has a strong background in materials science (MSc chemistry, chemical engineering, materials science, or related field) with a strong interest in business.
• Alternatively, we are interested in recruiting entrepreneurs that are active in living materials start-ups. These existing initiatives may need scientific support on different levels and stages in the value chain and a PhD trajectory could be an interesting option.
Qualifications Project 5 (A PhD Project that crosses the disciplines of at least one Young Academy Groningen member and one researcher from a different Faculty):
• The ideal candidate is ambitious, highly motivated and wishes to make a career in research. He or she has a thorough training in research skills, speaks and writes English fluently, and has considerable experience in the project area being proposed (ideally at Masters level).
Conditions of employment
Fixed-term contract: 48 months.
The positions are offered within the UG PhD Scholarship Programme. This programme is issued by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science (OCW) within the framework of the national PhD Scholarship Programme. PhD scholarship students receive a scholarship (stipend) of € 2,181 per month (gross) from the University of Groningen for a period of four years. PhD scholarship students are not employed by the university. PhD scholarship students have therefore different rights, obligations, and a different income than employed PhD candidates.Please consider the terms and conditions of the PhD Scholarship Programme on the following website: https://www.rug.nl/education/phd-programmes/phd-scholarship-programme/conditions-application/
Department
Young Academy Groningen
The University of Groningen is a comprehensive research university with a global outlook, deeply rooted in Groningen, City of Talent. Quality has been our top priority for over four hundred years, and with success: the University is currently in or around the top 100 on several influential ranking lists.The Young Academy Groningen (YAG), established in 2016, is an organization that brings together the most enthusiastic, positive and ambitious young researchers from diverse academic backgrounds. Our aim is to support the development of interdisciplinary research initiatives. To facilitate this, each year we have three PhD Scholarship positions available to help foster interdisciplinary collaborations amongst YAG members.
