Postdoc in Coastal Infrastructure Reliability under Climate Change

Join us at TU Delft to assess the reliability and climate resilience of coastal infrastructure systems in Europe, using state-of-the-art environmental datasets and future climate projections.

Job description

Coastal and offshore infrastructure systems are increasingly exposed to changing environmental conditions, sea level rise, and sequences of extreme events. Understanding how these changes affect their reliability and resilience is essential for supporting adaptation strategies, risk-informed design, and long-term decision-making.

TU Delft coordinates the Horizon Europe project EU-INTERCHANGE, which develops climate services, datasets, and tools to assess the impacts of climate change on European regional and coastal seas. The project will generate state-of-the-art hindcast and future projection datasets of marine environmental parameters, including waves, water levels, ocean conditions, storm surge information, and climate-change scenarios. These datasets provide a unique opportunity to assess how present and future environmental conditions may affect the reliability of coastal and offshore infrastructure systems.

Within this position, you will develop and apply reliability and risk analysis frameworks for coastal and offshore engineering systems, with specific attention to the combined effects of marine environmental loads, sea level rise, climate change, and system deterioration. The work will contribute to the identification of coastal risks and to the development of approaches that support coastal resilience, protection, and adaptation.

You will use advanced statistical and probabilistic methods to assess failure probabilities and reliability under present and future climate conditions. This may include Monte Carlo methods, multivariate statistical approaches, Bayesian networks, vine copulas, or other suitable methods to describe the dependence between environmental variables, infrastructure components, and possible cascading system effects.

The activities you will be responsible for will combine the processing and analysis of large environmental datasets with the development of probabilistic models for engineering reliability assessment. You will derive relevant environmental loading conditions, quantify uncertainties, and translate climate projections into reliability indicators and risk-based information that can support coastal infrastructure planning and adaptation. As a final stage, the developed reliability framework will be embedded in the EDITO portal, ensuring that the project outputs can be accessed and used within a wider digital environment for marine and coastal data services.

You will work in the Hydraulic Engineering Department of the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences at TU Delft, in close collaboration with project partners across Europe. In addition to your research activities, you will contribute to joint publications, participate in project meetings, collaborate with academic and professional partners, and support the supervision of MSc students. This position offers a unique opportunity to develop an independent research profile at the interface of coastal engineering, reliability analysis, climate change impact assessment, and infrastructure resilience.

Job requirements

Essential requirements

• A PhD degree in civil, mechanical, offshore engineering, or a closely related field.
• Proven experience in the statistical analysis of marine environmental variables.
• Demonstrated experience in the reliability analysis of coastal, offshore, or other engineering systems.
• Proven strong programming skills (e.g. Python, Matlab).

Desirable requirements

• Proven experience in coastal hydrodynamics and wave modelling.
• A record of scientific publications demonstrating strong analytical and writing skills.
• Ability to work both independently and collaboratively within a multidisciplinary team, and to communicate effectively with academic and professional partners.

TU Delft (Delft University of Technology)

TU Delft is a top international university combining science, engineering and design. It delivers world class results in education, research and innovation to address challenges in the areas of energy, climate, mobility, health and digital society.

Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences

The Faculty of Civil Engineering & Geosciences (CEG) is committed to outstanding international research and education in the field of civil engineering, applied earth sciences, traffic and transport, water technology, and delta technology. Our research feeds into our educational programmes and covers societal challenges such as climate change, energy transition, resource availability, urbanisation and clean water. Our research projects are conducted in close cooperation with a wide range of research institutions. CEG is convinced of the importance of open science and supports its scientists in integrating open science in their research practice. The Faculty of CEG comprises 28 research groups in seven departments, including Hydraulic Engineering and Water Management.

Conditions of employment

• Duration of contract is 28 months. Temporary external finance.
• An excellent pension scheme via the ABP.
• The possibility to compile an individual employment package every year.
• Discount with health insurers on supplemental packages.
• Flexible working week.
• Every year, 232 leave hours (at 38 hours). You can also sell or buy additional leave hours via the individual choice budget.
• Plenty of opportunities for education, training and courses.
• Partially paid parental leave.
• Attention for working healthy and energetically with the vitality program.