PhD position 'Designing biodiversity enhancing agri-food systems using bio-economic models at a...

Are you interested in designing sustainable agri-food production systems? Are you passionate about developing decision support models that can be used to explore alternative production activities that promote biodiversity and improve the efficiency of using scarce resources? Are you excited about mathematical programming, quantitative system analysis and data analysis? Do you appreciate interdisciplinary collaboration? Then this PhD position might be the perfect fit for you!

The Operations Research and Logistics group of Wageningen University is hiring a PhD candidate (4 years, full-time employment) to become part of a large national and multi-disciplinary project funded by the Dutch Science foundation (NWO). The main objective of this project is to make agri-food production systems more sustainable and capable to meet the increasing demand for healthy and safe food. This will be achieved by exploring the potential of alternative production systems (based on crop mixtures) to increase biodiversity of the Dutch agricultural landscapes and improve resource use efficiency throughout the food supply chain.

The PhD position will focus on developing bio-economic models that optimize farm management decisions and the allocation of available resources at a regional level taking into account complex biophysical processes and interactions between land use activities. The models will be used to provide policy and managerial insights about the structure of biodiversity enhancing agri-food production systems that optimize important indicators of economic, environmental and social sustainability.

A major challenge of this PhD position is to explore methods based on Mixed Integer Linear Programming, Multi-objective Optimization and Multi-criteria decision making and account for preferences and objectives of important stakeholders. Explicitly accounting for preference of decision makers will result in calculating solutions that are not only technically feasible but also acceptable by the farmers, managers and policy makers.

The research is embedded within the chair of Operations Research and Logistics , which is led by Prof. Dr. ir. Sander de Leeuw . You will be co-supervised by Dr. Argyris Kanellopoulos .

The group consists of 25 academics focusing on operations and supply chain issues in food and bio-based supply chains. Within this scope, the core research areas are:

• operations and supply chain performance analysis;
• the strategic configuration of network structures;
• the tactical and operational planning of material flows.

In addition to traditional efficiency goals, the research also aims to improve sustainability, product quality and safety, as well as health and nutrition. Current examples of research are the design and operation of circular supply chains, the management of disruptions in food supply chains, the connection between changing diets and sustainable supply chain design, the operations in omni-channel retail, the management of not-for-profit supply chains, and supply chain planning to minimize waste.