Postdoctoral Researcher Stress in Action

Do you have a PhD in psychology, biomedical sciences, bioinformatics or related? Are you interested in research on daily life stress and developing data processing strategies? Please apply at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU).

Your function

You will be a key part of the project team that will run the Stress in Action cohort enrichment study starting in 2026. The team will collect active and passive measures, including sensor data from smartphones, wearables, and ecological momentary assessment capturing the affective, cognitive, physiological, and behavioural components of the stress response in people’s natural environments. This work will generate unique large-scale datasets on daily life stress and its health impacts.

Your specific focus will be developing and implementing data processing pipelines for these large-scale multimodal datasets to enable scientific discovery. You will also contribute to team management and further develop standard operating procedures for data governance and data collection, covering topics such as study logistics, data privacy, and cross-cohort data linkage.

Advancing the careers of early-career researchers is one of the missions of the Stress in Action consortium, and this position offers you ample opportunity to engage in scientific endeavours that support an academic career. From the outset, you will be able to run analyses and write papers leveraging the existing lab-based and ambulatory datasets from the Stress in Action wearable validation pipeline. Subsequently, you will be able to use the Stress in Action cohort enrichment study data, strengthening your research profile and building a strong base for future grant applications regarding the consortium’s mission of better understanding stress-related disease.

In terms of teaching, you will support standard departmental activities, including co-teaching the undergraduate course Stress & Health, as well as B-thesis and M-thesis student supervision.

Your profile

For this position you are expected to have:

• A PhD degree in the fields of psychology, health sciences, neuroscience, biomedical sciences, epidemiology, bioinformatics, computer sciences, or a related discipline (also candidates close to the thesis defence are encouraged to apply)
• Affinity and experience with writing research papers
• Experience and/or strong interest in working with large-scale, multimodal datasets
• Knowledge of basic psychometric principles and related statistical methodology
• Good programming skills in Python, R, Matlab, or other tools
• English conversation, writing skills, and presentation skills
• Communication and social skills
• Interest in supervision of students
• Dutch language skills are a strong asset

What do we offer?

A challenging position in a socially engaged organisation. At VU Amsterdam, you contribute to education, research and service for a better world.

• A position for at least 0.8 FTE
• Your employment contract will initially last 1 year
• Afterwards, the possibility of expansion exists
• 8% holiday allowance and 8.3% end-of-year bonus
• Contribution to commuting expenses
• Optional model for designing a personalized benefits package
• Solid pension scheme (ABP)

About us

Stress in Action project

In this project, more than 100 multidisciplinary scientists from eight Dutch academic institutes collaborate around the theme of stress in daily life. Divided into three Research Themes and three Support Cores, the Stress in Action consortium will validate daily life stress assessments, examine which contextual factors contribute to the experience of daily life stress, and investigate how daily life stress leads to the development of both mental and cardiometabolic diseases. The project is funded through the Dutch Research Council under the Gravitation programme.

Where will you be working?

At the Department of Biological Psychology of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, we conduct research and education on the causes of individual differences in health behaviours and disease outcomes. It is a department with a long tradition in stress research, where enthusiastic and ambitious academics work to generate knowledge and translate it into improvements in health and wellbeing. Our research on the role of genetic and environmental factors, including stress, belongs to the international top.