Job at a glance
Maastricht University's School of Business and Economics, in collaboration with Sciensano, the Belgian institute for health and a leading public-health research organisation, is looking for a PhD candidate in Network Modelling for Food Safety and Regulatory Decision-Making. Sciensano brings established expertise in food safety, food contaminants, exposure assessment, risk analysis, and scientific evidence generation for public authorities.
The collaboration connects methodological research at Maastricht University with Sciensano's policy-facing work supporting food safety assessment and risk-manager decision-making at Belgian and European levels. The position focuses on the development of new multi-layer network modelling approaches for structured food-safety data. The aim is to support evidence generation for contaminant risk assessment, food safety monitoring, and regulatory decision-making.
The PhD candidate will conduct original methodological research while working in close connection with public-health and regulatory questions. The project offers a distinctive opportunity to develop rigorous computational models in a setting where scientific evidence, regulatory judgement, and societal impact are closely connected. This PhD project develops new multi-layer network modelling approaches for structured food-safety data.
The project addresses an open methodological challenge: how to specify, estimate, validate, and interpret network models that can support evidence generation for contaminant risk assessment and regulatory decision-making. The project focuses on the development of network-based models for analysing complex relationships in food safety data, including information relevant to contaminants, consumption patterns, exposure assessment, and regulatory prioritisation.
The methodological contribution lies in developing models suited to this type of heterogeneous and relational data, rather than simply applying existing ...