项目介绍

2024年4月20日

Function

Are you a highly motivated and skilled PhD candidate with a recent MSc degree in environmental sciences, biotechnology or related area? Do you have good communication skills, are you a result-driven team player and are you keen to develop yourself in a PhD project? And do you have experience in developing new sensors based on biotechnology? Then this could be the ideal PhD position for you!

You will be part of the BOM, Bioassays for Online Monitoring of water quality, project. This project aims to develop a new multiplex biosensor technology for the monitoring of water quality. The primary goal is to improve usability, accessibility and improve cost-effectiveness of water quality bioassays. The technology, named Receptomics, is based on a flow cell with an array of hundreds of receptors active in a monolayer of living human cells on a square centimetre.

Depending on the type of test, dozens of (water) samples can be analysed per chip which offers opportunities for the development of online monitoring. The results are obtained based on light signals (fluorescence or luminescence). Furthermore, we want to investigate whether yeast cells as alternative host cells can serve for the biosensor, which can simplify various applications for non-specialists.
Your duties and responsibilities include:

• conversion and optimization of existing and new assays for water quality monitoring;
• testing the multiplex assay in receptomics format;
• calibrating the assays by performing laboratory experiments assessing the effects of chemicals to aquatic organisms;
• performing semi-field experiments to validate the assays for effects on aquatic ecosystems.

You will work here
The research is embedded within the Aquatic Ecology and Water Quality Management Group of Wageningen University and the Bioscience group of Wageningen Plant Research. You will be co-supervised by Prof. Dr. Paul van den Brink and Dr. Maurice Henquet.

Function Requirements

You have:

• good communication skills and are eager to develop new tools to explore the potential of nature to improve the quality of life.

You also possess:

• a successfully completed MSc degree in in environmental sciences, biotechnology or related area, with a strong experimental biotechnology and/or ecotoxicology-related background;
• experience in laboratory work and experiments;
• experience in writing scientific English;
• a desire to contribute to improving the water quality in the Netherlands.

For this position your command of the English language is expected to be at C1 level. Sometimes it is necessary to submit an internationally recognised Certificate of Proficiency in the English Language. More information can be found here.

Contactinformation

For more information about this position, please contact please contact Prof. Dr. Paul van den Brink, professor at the Aquatic Ecology and Water Quality Management Group (www.stressecology.eu ), paul.vandenbrink@wur.nl.

For more information about the procedure, please contact Noorien Abbas, corporate recruiter, noorien.abbas@wur.nl