Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) Soft and Biodegradable Sensor Technology in Agri-Food prduction

Are you an ambitious researcher that loves to work on cutting-edge sensing technologies that contribute to sustainable agri-food production? Are you a team player that loves to work in a multidisciplinary field?

Population growth, climate change, resource depletion and soil degradation are placing huge challenges on agriculture. Successful agricultural decision making requires sensing of soil heterogeneity in real-time in order to optimize time, location and degree of agricultural operations (e.g. sowing, irrigating, fertilizing and harvesting). A biodegradable soil sensor system would allow the distribution of a dense sensor network in the soil and monitor soil status without leaving hazardous e-wastes to the environment.

As an assistant professor (TT) in Soft and Biodegradable Sensor Technology you will contribute to the 4TU Green Sensors project. The 4TU Green Sensors project, led by the Farm Technology Group of Wageningen University & Research, is a complementary and multidisciplinary collaboration among four Dutch universities of technology (Delft University of Technology - TU Delft, Eindhoven University of Technology - TU/e, University of Twente - UT and Wageningen University & Research - WUR).

Supporting a more digitalized and sustainable agriculture the project aims to develop a biodegradable soil sensor network to be used to manage or control agri-food production in a sustainable way. Four tenure track Assistant Professors and two postdoctoral researchers will be working on topics like sensor design and fabrication, biodegradable network of sensors, soft and biodegradable sensing technology as well as modelling and control of agri-food production systems using sensor networks. Mutual collaborations amongst researchers are central to this project.

This position in Soft and Biodegradable Sensing Technology for Agri-food production will focus on investigating and developing soft sensing principles for monitoring and control of agri-food systems using biodegradable soil sensors. Soft sensing is an approach to combine one or more existing (indirect) sensor signals with knowledge of the system formalized in models to assess properties that cannot easily be sensed directly. Focusing on open-field farming, your research project will address a systems analysis to identify what soil properties need to be measured with what accuracy and resolution in space in time in relation to different crops, climates and seasons, choosing and mobilizing suitable (soft) sensor principles, sensor calibration and verification in laboratory and field, and interfacing sensing with learning based control systems.

While leading the Soft and Biodegradable Sensing Technology domain within the Farm Technology Group, you will collaborate with Prof. Eldert van Henten, a leader in sensing, modelling and automation of smart agri-food production (also leader of 4TU Green Sensor project), and Dr. Congcong Sun, assistant professor of learning-based control and Reinforcement Learning.

We expect you to broaden your work on soft sensing principles beyond soil sensing in open field agriculture to other application domains like greenhouse horticulture and livestock farming. Expected opportunities are related to assessment of losses and emissions to the environment and control of indoor aerial conditions.

When successful your initial temporary contract will be extended to a tenured position within the Farm Technology Group of WUR.

In case of a Tenure Track position for this career path:

• you acquire, lead and implement innovative and creative(inter-) national research projects in the Farm Technology Group;
• you collaborate with colleagues and supervise PhD students, BSc and MSc theses and you develop and teach courses;
• you contribute to the further development of the Farm Technology Group.