Vacancies

Check out our current vacancies for an acadamic career at the University of Twente!

PHD STUDENT POSITIONS WITHIN THE ERC ADVANCED PROJECT “RECRUIT”

This project aims to take the concept of receptor recruitment from biology and use it as a design criterium for self-assembling building blocks into well-defined molecular and nanoscale architectures. Intrinsically weak and dynamic interactions are essential in achieving self-assembly and recruitment. Exquisite control over stoichiometry and structure of the assemblies is achieved by harnessing ground-breaking developments in the understanding of the underlying multivalent interactions. These breakthrough insights will be used to tackle challenges with the identification, sensing and isolation of biological particles, such as viruses and extracellular vesicles, through the development of platforms with nanoscale dimensions and molecular functionalities. As such, this project takes inspiration from nature, by borrowing recruitment as a concept to build self-assembled materials, and to contribute to a better understanding of living systems using new detection and isolation tools, with application prospects for biomedical platforms and smart materials.

PhD student positions are foreseen on these topics: Design and assembly of well-defined structures based on receptor recruitment; Fixation of recruiting self-assembling systems; Engineering of signaling functions in recruiting systems; Device platforms to count and isolate biological particles. The positions are part of the ERC Advanced project “Receptor Recruitment as an Organizational Principle for Self-Assembling Matter, RECRUIT”.

Please check this link for more information

PHD POSITION FOR OPTO-ELECTRONIC NEUROMORPHIC COMPUTING

The Hybrid Materials for OptoElectronics (HMOE) group is looking for a PhD researcher to develop the novel plasmonic molecular materials for opto-electronic computing. To realise non-von Neumann neuromorphic computation, development of opto-electronics based on organic molecular materials is promising, due to their low switching energies and high flexibilities compared to the conventional silicon-based circuits. The aim of the project is to develop fundamental understanding of charge transport and light-matter interactions involved in the molecular materials, which can then be tailored to emulate brain-like computation.

The PhD researcher will fabricate opto-electronics based on molecular tunnelling junctions consisting of tuneable organic molecules and thin films of flexible materials, perform electrical measurements, build optics to realise imaging and spectroscopy of the junctions, and analyse the electrical and optical responses of the system. This will eventually enable the evolution of molecular tunnelling junctions to be photonically active devices, which opens prospects for the innovative optical computing.

The project will be carried out in a multidisciplinary research programme. You will be part of the HMOE group (Department of Molecules & Materials, Faculty of Science & Technology), working closely with the leading theoretical and experimental groups worldwide, and backed by MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology, the largest research institute of the UT.

Please check the following link for more information: