PhD candidate 'Stress monitoring in laboratory rodents'

Smart technology is revolutionizing how we monitor animal well-being in real time. In this cutting-edge PhD project, you'll combine AI, behavioral science, and animal models to detect stress before it becomes visible. Are you ready to bridge the gap between science and animal welfare?

The discovery, development, and safety of most medications critically rely on experiments involving animals. This requires humans to provide a high standard of care for the animals. In the SmartStressMonitor (SSM) project, our Dutch-German consortium of industrial and academic partners will develop the underlying technology for an automatic distress monitoring system for mice and rats in their home cages. We will use recent advances in AI analysis and acoustic sensing technology to track their movements and vocalisations, and estimate the distress of individual animals that are socially housed. This will be performed in real time to rapidly inform animal caretakers.

As a PhD student, you will be responsible for providing training material to develop the AI-based tool and for testing prototypes under different housing conditions in the animal facility, using mouse and rat models for stress-related disorders. By linking home cage behaviour to experimental data using these models, you will refine the understanding of individual differences in stress-related behaviours and uncover what has so far remained hidden: how animals transfer experiences from experiments to cage mates, and from interactions with cage mates to task-based behavioural performance. This project is funded by Interreg.

You will be required to carry out the aforementioned in vivo animal studies. You will be responsible for optimising experimental protocols, as well as processing, analysing, and interpreting complex multimodal behavioural datasets. You will closely interact and collaborate with the supervisors’ teams, who have both theoretical and hands-on expertise in behavioural testing and programming. Since the tool is new, pioneering efforts from the ideal candidate will be essential.

Furthermore, you will receive training in soft skills such as scientific presentation, participate in various (inter)national conferences, and contribute to outreach activities. As an obligatory part of the PhD trajectory at Radboudumc and the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, you are required to write publications and, at the end of the project, a PhD thesis.

You have a Master in (cognitive) neuroscience, (medical) biology, or related field. Moreover you have:

• Very good/excellent command of oral and written English.
• Experience with the analysis of complex datasets.
• Experience with animal work, or a strong desire to learn.
• Experience with programming (e.g. MatLab, Python)
• Technical insight, curiosity for scientific questions and problem-solving skills.
• Very good social, communicational, and organizational skills.
• Dutch (art 9) or European (FELASA) certificate to work with animals is a plus.

At Radboud university medical center, you build on your future. We are committed to providing the best care, education, and research. And we are true to our word, because we help you develop and seize opportunities and give you the room to grow. As an employer, we believe that employees should feel vital and happy at work in all stages of life. We are also committed to creating a healthy and safe working environment. Our employment conditions contribute to that. What we offer:

• Upon commencement of employment, you will start at scale 10A, step 0 (€ 3.017 based on a full-time appointment). Over a maximum period of 4 years, you will progress to scale 10A, step 3 (€3.824 based on a full-time appointment). You will also receive an 8% holiday allowance, an 8.3% end-of-year bonus, and a 47% to 72% bonus for working unsocial hours.
• From 1 July 2025 an increase in salary with 3%.
• 176 vacation hours per year based on a 36-hour working week.

The project is embedded within the Department of Medical Neuroscience (MNS) at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, which is a highly dynamic Dutch institute with a collaborative atmosphere, focusing on fundamental and applied neuroscience research at top level. The successful candidate will join the Behavioural Neurogenetics group led by Prof. Dr. Judith Homberg and will be co-supervised by Dr. Bernhard Englitz (Computational Neuroscience Lab).

Radboudumc
Welcome to Radboud university medical center (Radboudumc), where scientific breakthroughs are born through the curiosity and passion of our collaborating researchers in a vibrant environment. We believe trust and excitement are crucial elements to achieving our goals, and we approach our research as teams and with the utmost rigor to make a significant impact on health and healthcare. Our researchers are driven by their fascination with the biological, psychological, and sociological mechanisms underlying health and healthcare. They collaborate with partners from all over the world to improve health outcomes for all. Radboudumc unites patient care, research, education, and corporate learning, which allows us to approach our mission to shape the health and healthcare of the future in an innovative and person-centered way.

Our ambition is to lead the way in the pursuit of prevention, sustainability, meaningful care. We believe that through our research, we can significantly improve the health and well-being of society. Join us on our mission to make a difference in healthcare. Become a part of our community of gifted researchers, professionals or patient partners who are dedicated to making a real impact on population health and healthcare.

Read what it is like to do a PhD at the Radboud University Medical Center.

Any questions? Or wondering what it is like to work at Radboudumc? Then call or email to Prof.dr. Judith Homberg via +31 24 361 09 06 or with Dr. Bernhard Englitz. Use the Apply button to submit your application.