In our team we have a vacancy for an Assistant Professor who is specialized in the cross/multi-disciplinary field of Humanitarian Engineering.
Ending poverty and promoting human development, in a socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable manner, is the greatest challenge of our era and the key priority in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
The world is facing challenges of increasing complexity. We believe integrated social-technical solutions are needed to properly tackle the Humanitarian Challenges in areas such as resilience, infrastructure and the environment. Problem solving in situations of serious structural or accidental resource limitations requires frugal engineers, serving immediate vital or fundamental human needs. Integrating social science with engineering ingenuity provides the basis to social-technical systems thinking, core to developing frugal innovation solutions for tackling global challenges at a local scale.
To solve these situations, that afflict more than 10% of the whole world population, in both developed and developing countries, it is necessary to train professionals able to bring effective solutions.
The University of Twente wants to create a team on Humanitarian Engineering (HE) with the aim to offer a MSc programme of 120 EC in 2024 and to spark new research lines on this domain. The programme results in HE academic professionals that can research, design, organize and manage structural or incidental interventions towards innovations to overcome resource limitations. Through structured problem analysis methods and explicit involvement of the stakeholders they use local contextual awareness to find and adapt technical solutions to suit local needs.
Due to the composition of our team, we prefer candidates with experience and affinity to tailoring technical solutions to fulfil needs of vulnerable communities in developed and developing countries. Candidates with expertise in education sciences/educational design are encouraged to apply!
The challengeAs an Assistant Professor you will:
- carry out innovative research and translate academic research results into engineering practice;
- be active in networks for acquiring research funding for junior researchers and have ambition and experience in working closely with companies and government agencies;
- take part in the teaching tasks for courses in our new master programme of humanitarian engineering and in the bachelor and master courses in industrial design and mechanical engineering.
- improve your home-based specific expertise and develop an interdisciplinary research line;
- publish papers in international refereed journals and coach junior researchers in doing so;
- supervising bachelor and master final-year assignments;
- contribute towards the supervision of junior researchers.