PhD candidate in Logic, Language and Computation

The Faculty of Humanities welcomes all who wish to contribute to our knowledge and understanding of language, history, and culture, and invites applications for its PhD fellowships. The Faculty has more than 100 professors who can act as a PhD supervisor, and can provide all necessary training and facilities. PhD fellows are employed by the Faculty and generally complete their projects within four years in a part-time appointment of 80%. Eleven PhD positions are offered starting in September 2014.

Research in this domain, which is conducted at the interfaculty Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), focuses on processes related to the encoding, transmission and comprehension of information. The notion of information is taken in a broad sense, covering the properties of formal languages, the information flow in natural language processing, but also human cognitive activities such as reasoning and music cognition.

Project description

In this domain, the Faculty of Humanities has a PhD position available starting 1 September 2014. It is the intention to embed this position in the newly founded Joint Research Center in Logic, a collaboration project between the Universiteit van Amsterdam and the Tsinghua University in Beijing.

In order to apply for a PhD position you should submit a project proposal following the guidelines below and using the format provided. Your project should fit within the research programme carried out within this research domain. The descriptions of the relevant research groups as well as an overview of the researchers involved can be found here. Feel free to contact the research group coordinator if you want to know more about the research conducted in a specific research group.

Requirements

A requirement for applications in this domain is that you establish contact with the envisaged super­visor and come to an agreement about the supervision before you submit the proposal. Projects without a supervisor will not be considered. Given the interfaculty status of the ILLC, the envisaged supervisor of the project can be a staff member of the Faculty of Science, provided that the research proposal itself has a Humanities signature.

Further information

• Yde Venema, academic coordinator

Appointment

The selected PhD candidate will be appointed for 80% of their time for a period of four years at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. A first contract will be given for 12 months, with an extension for the remaining period on the basis of a positive evaluation.

The gross monthly salary (on a full-time basis) will be €2,083 during the first year to €2,664 during the fourth year, in accordance with the Collective Employment Agreement of the Dutch universities.

Candidates who would like to do a PhD project in their own free time are also welcome to apply as external PhD researchers.

Job application

Together with your PhD proposal, please check the guidelines,  you have to submit:

• a letter of motivation (no more than two pages);
• a current CV;
• a list of grades obtained for your Bachelor and Master (or equivalent) programmes;
• names and contact details of two academic referees;
• a writing sample, e.g. a published paper or your MA-thesis.

All documents should be submitted digitally and should be received no later than 13 January 2014, 1 p.m. (CET) at ResearchClusterC-fgw@uva.nl.