PhD position VIA PRUDENTI - Collaborative Infrastructure and Asset Management Practices
Do you enjoy conducting socially engaged research within an interdisciplinary team? Would you like to collaborate closely with both practitioners and academics to contribute to our living environment? If so, this position could be an excellent fit for you!
Society is facing major challenges like labour and material scarcity, digitalisation and climate adaptation. These challenges have a significant impact on our built environment and the actors that operate in this field. Addressing these challenges requires a fundamental change in how public organisations operate and coordinate themselves and their relations with private parties in the construction industry.
This PhD project aims to experiment with unique shared service centres to coordinate and conduct asset management and maintenance activities across infrastructure networks in the Netherlands. Together with our research partners from Next Generation Infrastructure network, the PhD candidate will be in the lead to develop organisational principles and action perspectives that help infrastructure agencies to collaboratively maintain our roads, bridges, waterways, electricity networks and railways.
As part of the larger NWO funded VIA PRUDENTI project, we will truly experiment with working towards a resilient and smart infrastructure sector by co-creating integrated service delivery solutions across infrastructure networks, studying how infrastructure administrators handle uncertainty and complexity across multiple organisational levels when managing their infrastructure assets.
The candidate will operate at the intersection of various academic disciplines (construction management, operations research, digitalisation & innovation management, purchasing & supply chain management, organizational studies) and actively engage with Dutch (semi) public infrastructure organisations and gain unique experience in different professional settings in the Netherlands. This requires a curiosity for interdisciplinary and qualitative empirical research and a sense of urgency for turning theory into practice and practice into theory in close collaboration with the research team and their partners.
Information and application
Are you interested in this position? Please send your application via the 'Apply now' button below before 15 September 2025, and include:
- A cover letter (maximum 2 pages A4), emphasizing your specific interest, qualifications, motivations to apply for this position.
- A Curriculum Vitae, including a list of all courses attended and grades obtained, and, if applicable, a list of publications and references.
- Contact information of two scientific staff members (one of whom could be the supervisor of your MSc thesis/final project) who we may contact for references.
For more information regarding the topic of position, you are welcome to contact Leentje Volker (l.volker@utwente.nl).
Date of first round interviews:
Monday 6 October 2025 / Wednesday 8 October 2025.
Date of second round interviews:
Friday 31 October 2025
About the department
You will work in the Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) research group at the faculty of Engineering Technology (ET) of the University of Twente. The Integrated Project Delivery group envisions sustainable and resilient civil infrastructure through integrated project delivery.
To achieve this vision, the IPD research group’s mission is to contribute to innovative solutions on different levels in which socio-technical transitions take shape, ranging from sector dynamics to project practices. This asks for interdisciplinary research, in which different disciplines and fields like civil engineering, organisational sciences and design sciences are combined.
Our mission is guided by two research lines, each addressing two levels on which innovations are developed:
1. resilient infrastructure systems
2. value-based project and programme delivery of infrastructure assets.
In this project we will closely collaborate with the Tilburg School of Economics and Management of the University of Tilburg, especially in the field of Systems & Operations Management.
About the organisation
The Faculty of Engineering Technology (ET) engages in education and research of Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering and Industrial Design Engineering. We enable society and industry to innovate and create value using efficient, solid and sustainable technology. We are part of a ‘people-first' university of technology, taking our place as an internationally leading center for smart production, processes and devices in five domains: Health Technology, Maintenance, Smart Regions, Smart Industry and Sustainable Resources. Our faculty is home to about 2,900 Bachelor's and Master's students, 550 employees and 150 PhD candidates. Our educational and research programmes are closely connected with UT research institutes Mesa+ Institute, TechMed Center and Digital Society Institute.
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