Postdoc Modelling Social Tipping Points for the Energy Transition

Descrizione

Postdoc Modelling Social Tipping Points for the Energy Transition Sintesi in italiano (traduzione automatica): L'Università di Amsterdam cerca un ricercatore post-dottorato per il progetto COMTIP, focalizzato sulla modellazione dei punti di svolta sociali per la transizione energetica. Il candidato selezionato sarà responsabile dello sviluppo della metodologia e del software, creando modelli basati su agenti e reti per identificare come le politiche possano accelerare il cambiamento verso l'energia sostenibile. È richiesta una laurea in discipline affini, come fisica, ingegneria o scienze sociali, e competenze in modellazione computazionale. Il lavoro avverrà in un team interdisciplinare e prevede la collaborazione con il RIVM, l'Istituto Nazionale per la Salute Pubblica e l'Ambiente dei Paesi Bassi. Il candidato dovrà anche partecipare attivamente a seminari e workshop con stakeholder. Do you want to discover the hidden levers that drive collective societal change? Are you excited about bridging computational complexity science with real-world policy design? Join COMTIP at the University of Amsterdam and help develop innovative agent-based and network models that identify how, when, and where interventions can successfully accelerate the green energy transition. You will work within an energetic, interdisciplinary team to turn advanced methodology into open-source software with direct public policy impact. Join us! Help build the next generation of computational models that reveal when society tips toward sustainable change – and when it stalls. In COMTIP (Computational Modelling of Social Tipping Points), a collaboration between the University of Amsterdam and RIVM (the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment), you will lead the methodology and software development at the core of the project: models that don’t just predict, but identify the mechanisms, leverage points, and reversals behind social tipping points – in other words, where, when, and how an intervention actually works, and where it can backfire. Methodology is the heart of the role; the energy transition is the first real-world testbed, and your methods are built to transfer across domains. You will combine agent-based, network, and information-theoretic approaches with stakeholder-driven causal structures, and join an interdisciplinary team at the University of Amsterdam working at the interface of complexity science, behavioural science, and policy together with RIVM, the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment. This is what you will do As a postdoctoral researcher, you will take primary responsibility for the methodology and software development at the heart of COMTIP. You will develop and refine agent-based, network, and dynamical-systems models – capturing tipping points, hysteresis, cascades, and reversible dynamics – and pair them with information-theoretic and causal tools to locate driver nodes and leverage points: the places where small interventions tip a system, and where they can backfire. You will turn this into well-documented, reusable open-source software and reproducible pipelines, and help shape a visual science–policy interface that communicates model outcomes to policymakers. The energy transition is the first application testbed – how incentives and policy can stimulate sustainable behaviour, starting with technology adoption – but the methodological core is domain-general, with scope for a second use case in year two. You will work closely with a PhD researcher (employed at RIVM) on healthy food choices and lifestyle-related diseases, integrating qualitative inputs (group model building, causal loop diagrams) with quantitative data, and you will help bridge complexity-science knowledge from the UvA into RIVM. You are expected to take an active role in team activities, from seminars and stakeholder workshops to collaborative papers and grants. Tasks and responsibilities: The list of tasks is not exhaustive and covers aspects of the project that may or may not be taken on by the Postdoc. If there are skills you already have or would like to develop, or a topic you are particularly interested in, please mention these in your motivation. Develop and refine agent-based, mean-field, network, and dynamical-systems models of collective behaviour, capturing tipping points, hysteresis, cascades, heterogeneous preferences, and reversible dynamics Apply information-theoretic, network, and causal tools to detect tipping points and identify causal driver nodes and leverage points — where, when, and how an intervention shifts (or backfires on) collective behaviour Formulate and validate computational methods to detect, analyse, and test social tipping points, and define when a model is “fit for purpose” for diffusion and intervention analysis Design and maintain well-documented, reusable, preferabl Annuncio in inglese. Fonte: Euraxess (Commissione europea).