Call for Applications: for Postdoctoral scholarship holder in computational political science, Apply by October 16, 2025
The University of Antwerp is a dynamic, forward-thinking, European university. We offer an innovative academic education to more than 20000 students, conduct pioneering scientific research and play an important service-providing role in society. We are one of the largest, most international and most innovative employers in the region. With more than 6000 employees from 100 different countries, we are helping to build tomorrow’s world every day. Through top scientific research, we push back boundaries and set a course for the future – a future that you can help to shape.
Profile
- You hold a PhD in political science, computational social science, linguistics, computer science, or a related field (or will have obtained it by the time you start work).
- Your research qualities are in line with the faculty and university research policies.
- Your teaching competences are in line with the University of Antwerp’s educational vision.
- You are motivated to apply computational methods to substantive political science questions.
- You have strong skills in automated text analysis and natural language processing (e.g., machine learning including neural networks, relation and entity extraction, classification, and topic modeling).
- You are comfortable with programming and analysis in R, including tidyverse, reticulate, tidymodels, etc.
- You are comfortable programming in Python and working with relevant NLP/ML libraries (e.g. spaCy, scikit-learn, Transformers, TensorFlow, or PyTorch).
- You have experience with collecting, cleaning, and annotating large text corpora.
- You have excellent command of English in both speaking and writing.
- It is an advantage if you have experience with parliamentary debate data or other political text corpora.
- It is an advantage if you are familiar with comparative politics, political communication, or democratic theory.
- It is an advantage if you have knowledge of multilingual NLP approaches.
- It is an advantage if you have experience in publishing in leading scientific journals.
- It is an advantage if you bring strong collaborative skills for team-based research.
- It is an advantage if you have experience with Linux systems.
What we offer
- We offer a full-time appointment as a postdoctoral scholarship holder for a period of one years. Following a positive evaluation, the scholarship can be renewed for another two years.
- You will have access to a dedicated high-performance workstation (Dell Precision 7960 Tower with NVIDIA RTX 6000 GPU, 128GB RAM, 32-core CPU) for large-scale NLP and machine learning experiments.
- The planned start date is 15 November 2025 or as soon as possible after that date.
- Your monthly scholarship amount is calculated according to the scholarship amounts for postdoctoral scholarship holders on the pay scales for Contract Research Staff (Dutch: Bijzonder Academisch Personeel, BAP).
- You will receive ecocheques, Internet-connectivity allowance and a bicycle allowance or a full reimbursement of public transport costs for commuting.
- You will do most of your work at the Stadscampus in Antwerp in a dynamic and stimulating working environment.
- Find out more about working at the University of Antwerp here.
Want to apply?
- You can apply for this vacancy through the University of Antwerp’s online job application platform up to and including Thursday, October 16, 2025 (by midnight Brussels time). Click on the ‘Apply’ button and complete the online application form. Be sure to include the following attachments:
- A motivation letter
- Your academic CV
- Two samples of academic or scientific work (e.g. published peer-reviewed articles, reports, PhD dissertation, working papers, or relevant computational outputs such as code repositories or software tools)
For more details, refer here
