Postdoc Urban Mental Health - City Labs

Living city labs are an attractive way to test, create and develop metropolitan solutions that can subsequently be adopted more smoothly and swiftly by all stakeholders involved. And as a result, have a long-lasting impact on solving complex multi-stakeholder societal and metropolitan challenges on a large scale.

About your role
The Centre for Urban Mental Health, together with its partners, want to co-create a project that has different target points, for example, on social cohesion, mental health problems or stress levels. You will play a central role in a variety of collaborative "city lab" projects with stakeholders relating to mental health issues in Amsterdam, including:

• Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS) - as part of their Urban Living Lab team: https://www.ams-institute.org/how-we-work/living-labs/.
• The Municipal health services (GGD) - who have unique data on the effects of changes in public mental health care policies, that are to be analysed.
• and with other stakeholders we are discussing possible collaborative projects.

This position is flexible and open to candidates looking to work part-time (e.g., scientist/practitioners) or who would like to job share. If you think you meet some but not all of the criteria, we still encourage you to apply. You will be expected to set up, run, publish and disseminate the results of these city lab experiments.

The successful candidate will ideally have:

Skills requirements:

• experience organizing psychological and policy-making interventions;
• affinity with, and interest in, interdisciplinary research;
• a proven capacity to publish in well-respected international scholarly journals;
• experience with advanced statistical techniques like network analyses;
• skilled in both quantitative and qualitative research methods;
• the willingness to become an academic mentor to students;
• experience working with non-academic stakeholders and partners.

Education:

• PhD or MD/PhD in a relevant related field, such as Psychology, Psychiatry

Work experience:

• A commitment to teaching and graduate training;
• a strong track record in, and a commitment to, interdisciplinary collaboration;
• Excellent communication skills in English. Dutch is a plus.

The successful candidate will be appointed within the Department of Psychiatry but will become a member of the Centre for Urban Mental Health (UMH) - one of the largest research priority areas of the University of Amsterdam, bringing together unique multidisciplinary research teams. UMH is embedded within three faculties of the University of Amsterdam and is unified by the emerging knowledge and skills available from the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, the Faculty of Medicine, and the Faculty of Science, together with the Institute for Advanced Study. This collaboration brings together unique multidisciplinary research teams and stakeholders from the Amsterdam region.

UMH aims to find new pathways to improve mental health in the city that take into account the complexities and dynamics of mental health problems and mental health disorders in an urban environment.

UMH is managed by two co-directors, prof. dr. Claudi Bockting and prof. dr. Reinout Wiers, and is supported by a coordinator and an assistant. Most meetings for UMH are held at the Institute of Advanced Study in the centre of Amsterdam.

For ongoing projects at UMH, see our website: www.centreforurbanmentalhealth.com

Starting a new job at AMR!