PhD positions Sustainability transitions microbiome innovations

Your function

The Athena Institute of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam is looking for 3 motivated PhD candidates to join the Holomicrobiome project. In this position, you will work on understanding and governing transitions towards sustainable food and health systems.

The Holomicrobiome project is funded by the Dutch National Growth Fund and seeks to develop microbiome innovations that can help accelerate transitions towards sustainable and healthy food systems and stimulate economic development. At the Athena Institute, we are involved in studying and supporting the governance of such mission-oriented projects.

Questions that arise are:
How can we understand complex transition processes, and how can mission-oriented innovation help govern them? How can we facilitate and monitor transformative learning between different scientists and societal stakeholders? And what business models should we develop to support microbiome innovations?

As a team, we will work on setting up and running Living Labs in which scientists and societal stakeholders will shape the future of the Dutch microbiome innovation systems. We will develop and implement monitoring frameworks to assess the transformative impacts of the project. And we will develop valorisation strategies together with private sector actors. As a PhD candidate, you will be involved in these activities, and you will conduct research both on and for the Holomicrobiome project.

This means that you will work in a transdisciplinary way: the project is both the research context and the research object. Based on this research and the project work, you collaboratively write scientific articles that will form the basis for your PhD thesis.

• PhD 1:
  Policy and governance for sustainability transitions

  This PhD candidate will focus on analyzing the (mission-oriented) innovation systems around microbiome innovations in the Netherlands, with a particular focus on the role that policy and governance can play in supporting these innovation systems. This entails studying how policy mixes for mission-oriented innovation can best be developed and implemented, what the roles of government in transitions are, and which governance strategies help to steer large-scale projects through Theories of Change.

• PhD 2:
  Transdisciplinary collaboration and learning in innovation systems

  This PhD candidate will focus on advancing understanding of how learning and transformative change can be organized, facilitated and analysed in complex transdisciplinary innovation ecosystems. This also means that there is room to explore for instance the power dynamics between different organisations and stakeholders, how transformative change can best be monitored, and how innovation ecosystems can be best supported.

• PhD 3:
  Valorisation and (institutional) entrepreneurship for microbiome innovations

  This PhD candidate will focus on developing strategies for valorisation (in the broad sense) of microbiome innovations. They will investigate the role of businesses and (institutional) entrepreneurs, the regulatory and market challenges these actors face, as well as the strategies that they can deploy in developing viable business models and value creation for microbiome innovations in different domains, such as human health, agriculture and food.

Within your PhD, together with your promotion team and the broader Holomicrobiome project team, you will conduct different studies. These studies will be largely qualitative and action-oriented (comparative) case studies of which the insights will also support the Holomicrobiome project. The studies will be further specified depending on the different interests of the PhD candidates and the team.

As part of the work at the Athena Institute, you are also expected to contribute to teaching (working groups) in the educational programmes of the Athena Institute (max. 0.2 fte).

• Completed Master degree in innovation studies, sustainable transformation, policy sciences, organisation sciences, management and entrepreneurship, or another relevant (interdisciplinary) social science field. Those with combined backgrounds in natural and social…