Double Degree PhD Scholarship : Assessing soil and crop health sugar-beet prod

Overview

Organisation/Company Université de Liège Department Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech Research Field Environmental science Engineering Technology Researcher Profile First Stage Researcher (R1) Positions PhD Positions Final date to receive applications 15 Apr 2026 - 00:00 (Europe/Brussels) Country Belgium Type of Contract Temporary Job Status Full-time Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme? Horizon Europe (other) Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure?

No

Context This PhD project offers an exciting opportunity to advance sustainable agriculture by integrating plant–soil interaction measurements with cutting-edge data science. The successful candidate will work at the interface of precision agriculture, remote sensing, and soil health assessment, developing innovative opensource tools to merge farm-level inventories with high-resolution drone and satellite data as well as soil and plant characteristics. By combining this information with advanced crop modelling, the project will generate new insights into how agricultural practices influence soil health, degradation processes, and plant responses, thereby contributing to the sustainable transition of the sugar beet producing sector.

The position is a collaboration between University of Liège (Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech) in Belgium and Poznan University in Poland, and includes secondments with industrial partners Raffinerie Tirlemontoise (Belgium) and ITTI (Poland).

Objectives Develop an open-source data management system allowing the integration of data coming from detailed farm inventory with high resolution remote sensing data (drones and satellite) as well as soil and plant characteristics. Assess and correlate key soil health indicators (e.g. soil organic carbon) and associated degradation processes (e.g. erosion and fertility decline) as a function of agricultural practices. Analyze plant response on degradation through crop-modelling within a precision agricultural and data fusion context.

• A novel open-source data management for agro-industrial stakeholders allowing to analyze multimodal data.
• A user friendly recommender system to facilitate sustainable agricultural practices with the objective to enhance the delivery of multiple ecosystem services.
• A next generation crop-model founded on real-time plant-soil interaction measurements from plot to landscape scales.
• At least two journals (ranked in Scimago not lower than Q2).
• At least two international conference papers (ranked in CORE not lower than
  
  B).

MSCA Mobility Rule: you must not have lived or conducted your main activity (work, studies) in Poland for more than 12 months in the 36 months immediately before your recruitment date. Doctoral Candidate Status: you must not already hold a doctoral degree. Educational Background: you must hold a master's degree in Computer Science; you must have earned the equivalent of 300 ECTS credits, with a major in Computer Science;

a minimum of 60 of these ECTS must be from your master's degree; your master's degree must be from a university recognized by the International Association of Universities.

Scientific Excellence: your academic background and skills must be a strong fit for the specific PhD project.

Language Proficiency: you must be fluent in both written and spoken English, as it is the official language of the project.

Publication Record (Merit): while not mandatory, a record of scientific publications will be considered a significant advantage.

• Database technologies (e.g., Postgre
  
  SQL), stream processing systems (e.g., Nebula Stream, Kafka, Flink), and programming languages (e.g., Python, Java).
• Data integration technologies (e.g., mediated architecture, data warehouse, data lake).
• Sensor and robotic technologies.
• Soil and plant sciences.
• Analytics on remote sensing data.