PhD in Visual Analytics of Virtual Reality for Enriched Visual Rehabilitation

In this project, several teams (clinical centers, serious game developers, and academic institutions) combine their multidisciplinary skills to create and deploy a solution for rehabilitating patients having visual impairments by offering them training scenarios using a virtual reality (VR) setup.

Your job
The Visualization and Graphics group within the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at Utrecht University (UU) is offering a four-year PhD position in Visual Analytics of Virtual Reality Eye Tracking Data. Research is conducted in close collaboration with the SMARTneurolab at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Department of Experimental Psychology. This position is part of a set of vacancies in the NWO-funded project VR4eVR: Virtual Reality for Enriched Visual Rehabilitation.

As PhD candidate in this project, you will conduct independent high-quality research resulting in a doctoral dissertation. Your research will focus on developing a gamified VR application to collect eye tracking data to measure and treat hemianopsia (partial blindness). Additionally, you will design a Visual Analytics solution for exploring complex data recorded from the training patients including eye tracking, task progress, and success rates. This will enable therapists to monitor and improve patients’ visual rehabilitation progress. You will collaborate with a diverse project team of academics, clinicians, and software developers to realize the goals of the project.

We are looking for an enthousiastic new colleague who meets several or all of the following criteria:

• Education: a Master's degree in Computer Science or related field, with the ability and willingness to learn new skills as required for the PhD project.
• Virtual Reality Development: demonstrable experience with virtual reality game development using several appropriate programming languages and libraries (e.g., C# with Unity, C++ with Unreal Engine).
• Data Visualisation: demonstrable experience with data visualisation and building visual analytics dashboards, including related math and statistics, using a number of appropriate programming languages and libraries (e.g., Python, JavaScript).
• Research: demonstrable interest, motivation, and enthousiasm for independent and team-based scientific research, including collaborative software development.
• Data Science: experience that demonstrates you are able to work in an applied data science context (e.g., collecting, formatting, cleaning, and analysing large amounts of complex data);
• Communication: excellent spoken and written English communication and interpersonal skills, knowledge of spoken and written Dutch is an advantage.

We offer:

• a position for four years (1.0 FTE);
• a gross monthly salary between €2,770 and €3,539 in the case of full-time employment (salary scale P under the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities (CAO NU));
• 8% holiday pay and 8.3% year-end bonus;
• a pension scheme, partially paid parental leave and flexible terms of employment based on the CAO NU.

In addition to the terms of employment laid down in the CAO NU, Utrecht University has a number of schemes and facilities of its own for employees. This includes schemes facilitating professional development, leave schemes and schemes for sports and cultural activities, as well as discounts on software and other IT products. We also offer access to additional employee benefits through our Terms of Employment Options Model. In this way, we encourage our employees to continue to invest in their growth. For more information, please visit Working at Utrecht University.

A better future for everyone. This ambition motivates our scientists in executing their leading research and inspiring teaching. At Utrecht University, the various disciplines collaborate intensively towards major strategic themes. Our focus is on Dynamics of Youth, Institutions for Open Societies, Life Sciences and Pathways to Sustainability. Sharing science, shaping tomorrow.

At the Faculty of Science there are 6 departments to make a fundamental connection with: Biology, Chemistry, Information and Computing Sciences, Mathematics, Pharmaceutical Sciences and Physics. Each of these is made up of distinct institutes that work together to focus on answering some of humanity’s most pressing challenges. More fundamental still are the individual research groups – the building blocks of our ambitious scientific projects.

You will join the Visualization and Graphics group at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences. You will be working closely with other members in this research group, other research groups within and outside of the faculty, and project partners from outside of Utrecht University. As the research topic has connections with medicine, data science, and game development, this allows for many interdisciplinary collaborations.