Postdoctoral Researcher: Accelerating the Transition to Animal-free Safety Assessment

The transition to animal-free safety assessment needs to accelerate. While our understanding of societal transformations is growing, how to govern the acceleration of such transitions receives less attention. Do you want to contribute to the transition to animal-free safety assessment and enhance our understanding of governing the acceleration of societal transformations? Then you have a part to play as a postdoc.
The Chair Group of Environmental Governance and Politics (EGP) at the Nijmegen School of Management, Radboud University, is looking for a postdoctoral researcher.

You will be part of the transdisciplinary consortium working on the project ’Accelerating the Transition to Animal-free Next Generation Risk Assessment (NGRA): A Transformative Governance Approach’, funded as part of the Dutch Research Agenda (NWA). The aim of this research project is to contribute to the acceleration of the transition to animal-free safety assessment for chemicals and pharmaceuticals in the EU (including the Netherlands) and the USA. To achieve this aim, it applies a transformative governance approach.

The consortium will experiment with transformative governance approaches to accelerate the transition through action research. As a postdoctoral researcher, you will play a central role in the project, working together with two PhD candidates, one also based at Radboud University, and the other at Utrecht University.

Your research includes analysing how societal values and discourses and the political economy of the pharmaceutical and chemicals industries influence the transition. You will develop a values framework to inform discussions on animal-free safety assessment in the context of other societal goals. You will also distil and bring together existing knowledge, including through drawing lessons learned from successful implementation of animal-free models; making existing knowledge of NGRA and NAMs more accessible (through text mining and developing index databases); and developing evidence and gap maps. Your research will be used in the action research performed by the consortium, in which you will also play a vital role.

We are looking for a colleague who is passionate about animal and sustainability issues – a researcher who wants to make a difference. We are looking for someone with the ability to make connections across disciplines and among a variety of societal actors, and with excellent organisational skills.