About Wageningen University & Research

Wageningen University & Research (WUR) is a renowned institution specializing in life sciences, attracting a diverse international community. We offer extensive support to employees relocating to the Netherlands, including visa assistance, housing guidance, and practical advice on settling in. Our Welcome Center provides resources on banking, schooling, and cultural integration. For partners, we offer a Dual Career program to help navigate the Dutch labor market. Additionally, eligible international staff may receive a tax exemption for up to five years.

About the job

Are you a talented doctoral graduate who has a passion for doing interdisciplinary research related to material processing and characterization? Do you want to perform exciting research on novel applications of food materials? Do you want to understand materials’ behavior during drying by using our in-house developed droplet drying platform? We invite you to apply for a postdoc position in the Laboratory of Food Process Engineering!

As a postdoctoral researcher, we expect you to contribute to the research as well as education of our chair group. A detailed description on the work activities regarding research and education can be found below.

Research: You will contribute to two ongoing research projects in our group. The first one is the ROBOFOOD project. In this EU project, we explore the futuristic application of making edible robots and robotic food for humans and animals. Currently, two PhD candidates are working on the ROBOFOOD project, focusing 1) on developing new ways to process and assemble edible materials for robotic applications and 2) on characterizing properties of edible materials for robotic applications, respectively. We have developed methods relying on 3D printing and freeze drying to process edible materials into composites which fulfil the requirements to be used in robotic applications, i.e. lightweight yet strong starch-based cryogels for edible airfoil.

The second project is the DRAGONS Egg project, which aims at increasing energy efficiency by steering droplet agglomeration in spray dryers. One PhD candidate is working on this project at WUR, who uses a unique in-house developed single droplet drying device to perform collision and drying studies. We would also like to facilitate independent research from you, if time and resources allow.

Education: You will contribute to educational activities to strengthen her/his skills in teaching/coaching students, examples are Product and Process Design, Automation in Food Manufacturing (online), etc. You will also be given the opportunity to supervise BSc/MSc thesis students on topics related to the two research projects as described above.

Strengthening your competences: As a postdoctoral researcher, further development of your competences will be supported via following courses. For example, Wageningen Graduate Schools (WGS) offers competences, skills and career-oriented courses for postdoctoral researchers.

You will work with Prof. Maarten Schutyser, Dr. Lu Zhang and other colleagues who are involved in the research projects.