Are you a passionate and committed researcher with strong expertise in cutting-edge computational social science approaches? With a keen interest in policymaking? Would you like to contribute to research that turns large-scale network analysis into actionable policy insights? Do you want to work in an interdisciplinary environment of leading researchers and policymakers at the City of Amsterdam? If so, we hope that you will apply to become our new colleague. 

We are currently searching for two PhD candidates (full-time, 4 years, expected starting date Spring 2026) on Population-Scale Social Network Analysis in the context of the Urban Impact Lab and PLANET-NL. 

The Urban Impact Lab is a new collaboration between the City of Amsterdam and the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Amsterdam. Its motto: social data science for a better city. Its aim: to bring together knowledge and expertise from policymakers and scientists to better answer today’s most pressing societal questions. PLANET-NL (Platform for the Analysis of Large-Scale Networks) is the national infrastructure for large-scale social network analysis, based at the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University.

While the position offers a certain degree of freedom in terms of the precise research direction, the candidate will be asked to work on issues related to social segregation, polarization, political behaviour, or public health. This ties into a broader objective of the Urban Impact lab, which is to understand how privacy-sensitive population-scale network data can generate actionable insights for better policy interventions.

As an ideal candidate for this position, you find yourself at home in the international computational social science research community with a keen interest in retrieving actionable insights to make better policies. You have a well-developed skillset in scientific programming and an affinity with network analysis in particular. Policy experience is a plus. You are able to work with very large data and have the creativity and curiosity to work with network measures and statistics. You may also be an expert on grounded computational social science: combining large-scale data analysis with detailed contextual (often qualitative) data. You may have a disciplinary background in either social sciences (such as sociology, political science, communication sciences), humanities, or computational science. You believe in interdisciplinary collaboration and you get excited about working across traditional disciplines. You want to know more about how research insights play out in practice, for the people living in Amsterdam. 

You are a creative team player who doesn’t shy away from entering new scholarly terrain and sees this as essential to scientific progress. You aspire to build a career with real impact, be that in science, public service, or industry. You have creativity, precision, and perseverance. You take initiative, have excellent communication skills, and are able to work in a team as well as independently. You are motivated by the social impact of your work rather than journal metrics, yet your ambition drives you to achieve excellence in all you do.

Do you recognize yourself? Do you want to be involved in frontier computational social science research? Are you thrilled by the opportunity to work in a truly interdisciplinary research environment? Send us your application.