Job description

Stress is the ‘buzzword’ of modern life and impacts all aspects of daily life. When stress occurs frequently, remains high for sustained periods of time, and/or overwhelms people’s resources, it can cause mental and cardiometabolic disease. The NWO Gravitation project “Stress in Action” capitalizes on the fast advances in technology and big data analytics to move stress research from the lab to daily life.

A theoretical framework of daily-life stressors and stress responses will be developed using novel insights from ambulatory assessments in large, long-running Dutch cohorts and from experimental validation studies. This generates novel, mechanistic understanding of 1) how responses to daily-life stressors arise from the temporal, dynamic interplay between context and person-specific factors, 2) how daily-life stressors and responses can be reliably measured in real-time, and 3) how and when potential beneficial stress-response mechanisms turn into detrimental effects on mental and cardiometabolic health. This will enable the development of novel monitoring and intervention strategies to track and reduce daily-life stressor and stress responses and their health impact.

The 'Stress in Action' project
In this project, 70 multidisciplinary scientists from six Dutch Universities collaborate around the theme ‘stress in daily life’. Divided over three Research Themes and three Support Cores, the Stress-in-Action consortium will conceptualize daily-life stressors, validate daily-life assessments of stressors and stress responses, examine which contextual factors contribute to the experience of daily-life stressors and stress responses, and examine how daily-life stress responses lead to the development of both mental and cardiometabolic diseases. The project is funded through the Dutch Research Council under the Gravitation program. More details can be found here: www.stressinaction.nl.

Your PhD project: Identifying and measuring contextual factors that shape daily-life stress
The goal of the project is to identify and measure contextual factors that shape daily-life stressors and stress responses. The project will develop a taxonomy including traditional contextual stress- evoking and -reducing factors in all life domains and novel contextual factors, acknowledging cultural, economic, institutional and technological changes that challenge individuals during their life course. The project will further provide an overview of ethically and psychometrically valid measures of contextual factors that are amenable to ambulatory assessment. Selection of candidate measures will be based on a combination of literature review, analysis of existing cohort data, and findings from experimentation with new self-reported and passive sensing-based non-invasive measures such as e.g. GPS coordinates or modern equivalents of the Electronically Activated Recorder. Candidate measures will be integrated in a final taxonomy of contextual factors reflecting multiple life domains and modern societal challenges.

What are your tasks?

• Conducting research that results in a dissertation and is in line with the objectives and requirements of the project.
• Organizing and executing systematic literature reviews and/or data collection and analysis for the different studies.
• Publishing the results of the research in international scientific journals.
• Presenting the research findings to fellow scientists in the larger Stress in Action project, and collaborate with them.
• Providing a limited number of educational activities at the UMCG Department of Health Sciences.

Working environment

The position is supervised by promotors from two universities and faculties: the University of Groningen, the Faculty of Medical Sciences/University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) and the University of Twente, Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences.

The University of Groningen is a research university with a global outlook, deeply rooted in Groningen, City of Talent. Quality has had top priority for four hundred years. The Faculty of Medical Sciences is the second oldest medical faculty in The Netherlands. The position is based within the UMCG Department of Health Sciences. We are an interdisciplinary and international research group in Community and Occupational Health. Our research and teaching activities aim towards the prevention of disease and the increase of health capacity in people and society. To maximize societal impact, our research typically seeks involvement of key stakeholders in the field of Community and Occupational Health, together with practitioners within Academic Collaborative Centers and policy makers. For more information, please check the link https://umcgresearch.org

The position will be embedded in the UMCG Department of Health Sciences, section Community and Occupational Medicine and co-supervised by the Department of Technology, Human and Institutional Behaviour, section Psychology, Health and Technology at the University of Twente. The research team consists of prof. Ute Bültmann, prof. Matthijs Noordzij, dr. Iris Arends, and associated colleagues.

What do we need

You are expected to:

• have a (research) MSc degree in health Sciences, (bio or health) Psychology, Spatial – Geo sciences, Human-Computer Interaction, biomedical sciences, sociology or a related discipline (also candidates close to graduating are encouraged to apply);
• be enthusiastic about writing international publications (and a dissertation);
• have good academic English conversation, writing and presentation skills;
• have good social and communication skills and are willing to work in an interdisciplinary team;
• have a strong interest to apply and learn data science and associated skills (e.g. working with R and Python);
• have good organizational skills and the motivation to organize and realize systematic literature reviews and data collections;
• have demonstrable competences of conceptual capacity, presenting, planning, organizing, and monitoring.

What do we offer

For the PhD position at the Faculty of Medical Sciences (UMCG) we offer you:

• A full-time appointment for a period of 4 years to be concluded with a PhD examination.
• After one year, the performance will be evaluated to decide whether there is sufficient progress to expect a successful completion of the PhD thesis within the coming 3 years.
• Salary a minimum of € 3.017,- gross per month in the first year and a maximum of € 3.824,- gross per month (scale PhD) in the final (4th) year, based on a full-time appointment (36 hours a week). In addition, the UMCG will offer you 8% holiday pay, and 8.3% end-of-year bonus. The conditions of employment comply with the Collective Labour Agreement for Medical Centres (CAO-UMC).
• Attractive secondary terms of employment.
• Intended starting date: February 2025 or upon agreement.

More information
If you have any questions about this position, we would love to hear from you. Feel free to contact us. Please note that during the holiday period, we will be unavailable and unable to respond to emails. We will reply as soon as possible.

For questions about the position

Any questions? Do contact us.

How to apply

Please use the the digital application form at the bottom of this page - only these will be processed. You can apply until 12 January 2025.
Within half an hour after sending the digital application form you will receive an email- confirmation with further information.

The selection interviews will take place in the week of January 27 2025.

The UMCG has a preventive Hepatitis B policy. The UMCG can provide you with the vaccination, should it be required for your position. In case of specific professions a ‘Certificate of Good Conduct’ is required.

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