PhD student or Postdoc: Modelling the life course impacts of social policies

Are you interested in understanding how social policies can contribute to improving health and social outcomes across the life course? Do you want to inform policy making for health equity? Join us as PhD candidate or postdoc and advance knowledge in social policy and public health.

Social policy decisions are often informed by short-term outcomes. This results in ‘firefighting’, i.e. policies that deal with problems after they occur, rather than long-term prevention. By developing innovative simulation models that incorporate the life-course consequences of policy options, your work will support policy makers to make better-informed decisions. Using Statistics Netherlands data, you will develop models and provide estimates for two policy cases: (i) free-of-charge contraceptives for all age groups; (ii) subsidized childcare for all families.

Your work is part of the NWO-funded project "Looking beyond the horizon: life-course modelling for improved policy making". This is a collaborative project between the department of Public Health, Erasmus MC, and the Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management (ESHPM). Within this project, there are two vacancies: the vacancy advertised here, for a PhD student or Postdoc at the department of Public Health, Erasmus MC, and a vacancy for a PhD student at ESHPM, which is advertised separately. The two researchers to be appointed on the project will be provided with a work space at both departments to foster intensive collaboration.

We are looking for highly motivated, analytically strong candidates:

• With an MSc degree (in case of an OIO appointment, i.e. PhD student) or a PhD degree (in case of a postdoc appointment) in Epidemiology, Public Health, (Health) Economics, Econometrics, Mathematics, Quantitative Sociology, (Developmental) Psychology or a related field.
• Who have experience with statistical programming (e.g., Stata, R).
• Who have a basic conceptual understanding of the potential life course consequences of social policies.
• Who enjoy working collaboratively in a multidisciplinary team while managing independent research tasks.
• Who are be able to read policy documents in Dutch and work with Dutch (meta-)data.
• Are proficient in English, both written and spoken, with the ability to communicate complex ideas clearly.
• Who are motivated to study policy-relevant questions.
• Who have some familiarity with, or are motivated to build up familiarity with, the Dutch policy context and the two policy cases under study.

Key skills that the candidate will be developing and working with are:

• Advanced quantitative data analyses.
• Simulation modelling.
• Management of Statistics Netherlands data.
• Scientific writing skills.

At the department of Public Health, we are dedicated to improve population health at local, national, and international level through excellent research and education. Our research is characterised as highly multidisciplinary and is focused on the development and use of innovative methods. Collaboration with and direct impact on practice and policy are at the heart of our work.