PhD position 3: Signatures of listening effort

Your role in the project

This advertisement is for PhD student 3 within the EASYLI project. In your work, you will assess new ways to manipulate auditory task demand and motivation to investigate their impact on listening effort and fatigue as measured with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and pupillometry. The student will apply the new tests to investigate the impact of (work-related) acoustical conditions and hearing aid settings. The student will receive a 4-year contract: for the first 1.5 years the appointment is at Eriksholm Research Centre, Snekkersten, Denmark. For the next 2.5 year, the appointment is at Amsterdam UMC, The Netherlands. The doctoral thesis will be obtained from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Requested profile:

  • Must have a professionally relevant background in hearing science, biological psychology, experimental psychology, biomedical sciences, health sciences, biomedical engineering, audiology, auditory or cognitive neuroscience or a similarly relevant discipline.
  • Must not already hold a doctoral degree.
  • Must comply with the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action mobility rule: not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc.) in Denmark for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately before the starting date.
  • Your education must correspond to a four- to five-year undergraduate degree program, successfully concluded by a master degree.
  • You must meet the requirements for admission to the faculty/institutional doctoral program.
  • You must have good communication and collaboration skills and be fluent in English.
  • Previous experience with speech understanding testing, psychophysiological measures such as fNIRS or pupillometry, or conducting experiments with humans will be an advantage.
  • Previous experience in advanced statistics and programming in Matlab, R, Python or similar are considered an advantage.
  • You must have an interest in supervision of students.

Where will you be working?

Eriksholm Research Centre

Eriksholm pursues audiological discoveries with the potential to significantly enhance end-user benefits in future hearing care. We work in close collaboration with academic research institutions, clinicians, and end-users, and being part of Oticon ensures that our scientific insights are applied in solutions that empower people with hearing loss.

We are a multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary team of scientists that respect and care about each other and we work in a very informal environment. We are all dedicated to exploring the unknown and striving for excellence, and we have scientific integrity and room for taking chances. Eriksholm has research facilities that include EEG, Ear-EEG, motion capture, eye-tracking, fNIRS, speech testing, a large anechoic chamber with speaker array, and a fully supported clinic and audiological facility.

Amsterdam University Medical Center, location VUmc

In the second part of the project, you will be based at the Amsterdam UMC, location VUmc, dept. of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, section Ear and Hearing. In this project you will work closely together with a team of psychologists, audiologists and technicians, and the other EASYLI doctoral candidates.

Your research will be embedded in the Amsterdam Public Health Research institute, which stimulates state-of-the-art research that contributes to the ever-growing health potential of individuals and communities across the course of life. The institute concentrates its research efforts in nine research programs in which 1700+ researchers from multidisciplinary disciplines are brought together.

Amsterdam Research brings together opinion leading academic research in the field of Health & Life Sciences developed in the Amsterdam region.

Amsterdam UMC has an open culture. This means that we hope that everyone feels welcome in our organization and that we strive to offer equal opportunities to everyone. We therefore cordially invite all interested parties to respond to this vacancy.

What will we offer?

  • A full-time, paid PhD position in a MSCA project for four years, in a European research project with high international visibility
  • A salary of minimum 35.000 and maximum 39.900 kr. gross per month in the first 18 months, for full-time employment.
  • A family allowance for the relocation of family (terms and conditions apply).
  • Access to state-of-the-art training within the EASYLI doctoral network in local as well as international courses, workshops and conferences.
  • A thorough training in the context of an industrial doctorate training program, while spending at least 18-months at a non-academic partner.
  • Opportunities to collaborate with discipline specific world leading researchers.
  • Responses are considered on an on-going basis until close-of-business on March 17.
  • The target starting date for the position is 1 August 2024

Interested?

For more information about this vacancy, you can contact Adriana Zekveld (aa.zekveld@amsterdamumc.nl); Hamish Innes-Brown (hain@eriksholm.com) or Dorothea Wendt (dowe@eriksholm.com). Senior supervisors of this student are Hamish Innes-Brown, Adriana Zekveld and Dorothea Wendt.

APPLY HERE