PhD position: Integrated Water Energy Food Nexus Modelling for Circular CEA

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Testo originale dell'annuncio (in inglese)

Are you interested in developing next-generation modelling tools for sustainable food production? Do you enjoy working at the interface of engineering, environmental sciences, and systems analysis? As a PhD candidate, you will develop an integrated modelling framework to analyze the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) nexus in Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA), including greenhouse and vertical farming systems. Future circular CEA systems rely on the integration of greenhouse production, renewable energy, livestock production, and wastewater treatment to recover and reuse water, nutrients, carbon dioxide, heat, and energy. However, these systems operate at different spatial and temporal scales, making their interactions difficult to analyze with existing modelling approaches. Using this framework, you will analyze resource flows, evaluate circularity scenarios, and support sustainable design and decision-making across interconnected sectors. This PhD is part of the Greenhouse in Transition program, jointly funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR, USA). The program brings together 29 industrial and 17 academic partners across the Netherlands and the United States and will employ 11 PhD candidates, 1 EngD candidate and 4 postdoctoral researchers. You will closely collaborate with another PhD candidate developing optimization and operational control strategies for circular CEA systems. Together, the two projects will establish the modelling and optimization foundations for future circular greenhouse and vertical farming systems. Your duties and responsibilities include: develop an integrated modelling framework to represent interactions between greenhouse production, renewable energy, livestock production, and wastewater treatment systems; analyze water, energy, carbon, and nutrient flows to evaluate circularity, sustainability, and resource efficiency under different scenarios; implement and validate simulation models for system analysis, scenario evaluation, and future optimization; collaborate closely with researchers, industrial partners, and fellow PhD candidates within the Greenhouse in Transition program, sharing data and research findings and participating in regular project and consortium meetings； dissseminate research findings through peer-reviewed publications and complete a PhD thesis. Your team This position is embedded within the Agricultural Biosystems Engineering (ABE) group at Wageningen University & Research. The chair group is led by Prof. Peter Groot Koerkamp . You will be supervised by Dr. Congcong Sun and Dr. Argyris Kanellopoulos , with Prof. Peter Groot Koerkamp serving as your promotor. You will work here The Agricultural Biosystems Engineering (ABE) group uses and develops state-of-the-art technology to improve agricultural biosystems and make them more sustainable. ABE studies how plants, animals, soil, technology, and people interact, and how we can design smarter systems for the future. The commitment of ABE is rooted in understanding the complexity of agricultural biosystems to leverage system-specific technological concepts and the underlying scientific and engineering principles to design, optimize, and manage agricultural biosystems and their impacts on society and ecosystems