[Hiring] PhD Position: Designing Virtual Reality Biofeedback for Enhanced Emotion Regulation in Police and Youth @Radboud Universiteit

Role Description

Are you passionate about affective neuroscience, biofeedback and virtual reality and looking for a project with which you can make direct societal impact? The recently started CONTEXT project will connect fundamental human affective neuroscience to direct societal impact in youth and police.

In the NWO National Science Agenda-funded CONTEXT project, researchers from neuroscience, developmental psychology and forensic psychiatry collaborate with societal stakeholders, including youth organisations and police, to improve emotion regulation at moments when it is needed most.

• The project is a unique collaboration between eight academic institutions in the Netherlands and more than twenty societal partners, representing fields such as security, education, healthcare and social services.
• The CONTEXT project will develop personalised biofeedback methods that train youth and police to recognise subtle, often unconscious, signals of stress.
• It will enable target groups to react more adequately in stressful moments by improving the early recognition of these signals in daily life and by training specific context-appropriate emotion-control techniques for stressful situations through virtual reality.
• By preventing violent escalations, CONTEXT aims to enhance societal safety and resilience while fostering stronger connections between societal groups that often experience high-impact conflict.

As a PhD candidate, you will help further refine and validate our virtual reality biofeedback game for both youth and police. You will:

• Collaborate with stakeholders, end-users, game designers and our CONTEXT science team to improve our virtual reality game and its biofeedback algorithms.
• Perform user-interaction tests in target groups and record and analyse psychophysiological measures of autonomic nervous system balance during acute stress such as heart rate variability.
• Help optimise our biofeedback algorithms and contribute towards setting up a large-scale trial to assess the efficacy of the newly developed methods.
• Interact extensively with other work packages in the project that focus on neuroimaging, ecological momentary and physiological assessments, theory and ethics, as well as societal impact.

You will have the opportunity to make a start with your teaching portfolio and dedicate 10% of your working time to teaching in the psychology curriculum.

Qualifications

• You hold a Master’s degree in cognitive neuroscience or an adjacent field (psychology, biology, biomedical sciences, computer sciences, or any other relevant MSc).
• You have a strong interest in fundamental research in affective neuroscience and/or its application to wellbeing and performance.
• You have affinity with, and experience in, the acquisition and analysis of psychophysiology (i.e. autonomic nervous system measures) using Matlab, Python or similar software tools.
• You have affinity with, or experience in, virtual reality serious game design and user experience (UX) assessment.
• You have affinity with, or experience in, advanced statistical analyses (including linear mixed-effects models and computational learning models) in R or similar statistical analysis tools.
• You are able to participate effectively in an interdisciplinary and translational research environment.
• You possess excellent interpersonal and communication skills to effectively collaborate and communicate in academia as well as with stakeholders.
• You have a proactive and goal-directed attitude and good organisational skills.
• You are fluent in written and spoken Dutch and English.
• Even if you do not meet all criteria, you are encouraged to apply if the role interests you.

Benefits

• We will give you a temporary employment contract (1.0 FTE) of 1.5 years, after which your performance will be evaluated. If the evaluation is positive, your contract will be extended by 2.5 years (4-year contract).
• You will receive a starting salary of €3,059 gross per month based on a 38-hour working week, which will increase to €3,881 in the fourth year (salary scale P).
• You will receive an 8% holiday allowance and an 8.3% end-of-year bonus.
• You will receive extra days off. With full-time employment, you can choose between 30 or 41 days of annual leave instead of the statutory 20.

Practical Information and Applying

You can apply only via the button below. Address your letter of application to Floris Klumpers. In the application form, you will find which documents you need to include with your application. We look forward to receiving your application.

• The first interviews will take place on Wednesday 27 May.
• Any second interview will take place on Wednesday 10 June.
• In the first round candidates will be interviewed in a 30-minute round on their motivation and suitability for this position.
• In the second round, we will ask candidates to perform a short assignment (such as giving a presentation with a short research proposal).
• You will preferably start your employment on 1 September 2026.