PhD Position – Energy Systems Engineering; Sufficiency & Mobility Transitions

Institute of Mechanics, Materials, and Civil Engineering (iMMC)

Organisation/Company université catholique de Louvain Department Institute of Mechanics, Materials, and Civil Engineering (iMMC) Research Field Engineering » Systems engineering Researcher Profile First Stage Researcher (R1) Positions PhD Positions Final date to receive applications 1 Jun 2026 - 08:00 (Europe/Brussels) Country Belgium Type of Contract Temporary Job Status Full-time Hours Per Week 38 Offer Starting Date 1 Oct 2026 Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme?

Not funded by a EU programme Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure? No

Context

We are seeking an outstanding and highly motivated
PhD candidate in Energy System modelling
for a
fully funded 4-year position
at UCLouvain (Belgium), within the interdisciplinary ARC project
LESS4

MORE
( Leveraging Individual and Collective Engagement in Sufficiency Strategies for Mobility ).

The PhD will be supervised by
Prof. Francesco Contino
and embedded in a dynamic, international research environment at the intersection of
energy system analysis, environmental impact assessment, and modeling to generate alternatives.

Project Overview

Personal mobility stands out as a particularly pressing challenge: it is the only sector whose emissions have not decreased since 1990.The transition toward sustainable mobility cannot rely on technological innovation alone. It should also and in priority rely on sufficiency. Sufficiency-based strategies have been identified as a key lever for defossilisation in the scientific literature (and referred to in the IPCC's last assessment report), but they raise critical legal, social, psychological, technical, and political challenges.

The LESS4

MORE project brings together law, engineering, psychology, health, and economics to address central questions about sufficiency in mobility. How can energy system modelling
, legal feasibility, behavioural dynamics, and socio-economic considerations be integrated into a coherent analytical framework? How do factors such as legality, distributive fairness, psychological adherence, and health co-benefits influence not only policy acceptance, but also the performance and structure of future energy systems
? The engineering component focuses on analysing the deployment of mobility-related sufficiency measures in Belgium and quantifying their impacts on energy demand, system configurations, and environmental outcomes.

We are recruiting a PhD candidate in engineering to contribute to the systemic transformation of energy systems, with a focus on mobility and sufficiency in Belgium. The candidate will develop and apply the Energy Scope model to better represent mobility demand—accounting for heterogeneity in practices across income groups, regions, and uses—and to explore alternative, sufficiency-oriented energy futures.

PhD Objectives

The research focuses on improving and applying an energy system model to study mobility transitions under sufficiency constraints
.

Main objectives include:

• Enhancing the representation of mobility demand in
  Energy Scope (trip types, socio-economic groups, regional differences), building in particular on analyses conducted by the economics team using the BEAMM platform (More information: (Use the "Apply for this Job" box below). )
• Exploring reference and
  sufficiency-oriented mobility scenarios
  informed by constraints and insights from the law, psychology, and economics teams and study their impact on the energy system.
• Assessing environmental impacts
  , including life cycle analysis (LCA)
• Analysing trade-offs and flexibility using advanced modelling approaches (MGA), with interdisciplinary discussion
• Contributing to participatory modelling approaches ( human-in-the-loop ) integrating stakeholder preferences informed by constraints and insights from the law, psychology, and economics teams
• Co-develop, in close collaboration with the other LESS4
  
  MORE research teams, a robust interdisciplinary framework for the analysis and operationalisation of sufficiency in energy and mobility systems

Research Approach

The work is strongly systemic and interdisciplinary
. The candidate…