项目介绍

2026年8月26日

Develop smart materials that sense danger and seal themselves

This is what you are going to do 

• Use coarse-grained and atomistic simulations to understand the interactions between peptides and surfaces, including MOFs, and unravel the physical mechanisms of their aggregation at these surfaces.
• Build a highly coarse-grained model for MOFs with tunable pore and surface chemistry and study the physicochemical properties of peptides loaded into the materials.
• Build surrogate models and apply machine learning techniques to extract design rules and rapidly screen thousands of MOF-peptide combinations, prioritizing the most promising systems for detailed simulation and experiment.
• Closely collaborate with your experimental colleague to link computational and experimental results.
• Contribute to the validation of the experiments at TNO, publish and present your results, contribute to the supervision of BSc/MSc students
• Publish and present your work within the project consortium and on international scientific platforms
• Contribute to the teaching activities of the department.

This is what we ask of you

• Master’s degree (or equivalent) in chemistry, physics, computational science, biochemistry, physical chemistry or a closely related field. 
• Demonstrated experience with molecular simulations (coarse-grained and atomistic) and/or experience with machine learning techniques  (e.g. VAE, UMAP, surrogate models).
• Working carefully and reproducibly, document simulation conditions and results clearly, and are motivated to analyse complex data and connect these results to experimental results.
• Excellent programming skills (e.g. C, Python).
• Excellent communication skills in oral and written English and Dutch.
• Strong initiative and excellent time management skills.
• Open to collaborate with students (BSc/MSc), PhDs and PDs involved in related project and research groups within and outside the Netherlands.

This is what we offer you

The gross monthly salary, based on 38 hours per week and ranges between €3,204 (1st year) to €4,051 (last year), scale P. This does not include 8% holiday allowance and 8,3% year-end allowance. The UFO profile Promovendus is applicable. A favourable tax agreement, the ‘30% ruling’, may apply to non-Dutch applicants. The Collective Labour Agreement of Dutch Universities is applicable.

Besides the salary and a vibrant and challenging environment at Science Park we offer you multiple fringe benefits:

• 232 holiday hours per year (based on fulltime) and extra holidays between Christmas and 1 January;
• multiple courses to follow from our Teaching and Learning Centre;
• multiple courses on topics such as leadership for academic staff;
• multiple courses on topics such as time management, handling stress and an online learning platform with 100+ different courses;
• 7 weeks birth leave (partner leave) with 100% salary;
• partly paid parental leave;
• the possibility to set up a workplace at home;
• a pension at ABP for which UvA pays two third part of the contribution;
• the possibility to follow courses to learn Dutch;

Are you curious to read more about our extensive package of secondary employment benefits, take a look here.

We are looking for a PhD candidate to lead the computational and theoretical track of an interdisciplinary project on breathable, self-sealing coatings. The concept combines porous metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) with fibril-forming peptides. MOFs will act as both reactive interfaces and peptide reservoirs: chemical reactions at the material can trigger peptide release and self-assembly into a sealing film. You will work closely with a second PhD candidate focused on synthesis and spectroscopy and with project partners at UvA and TNO. Your simulations and predictions will connect molecular-level reaction mechanisms to materials performance to be validated by your experimental colleague.