The Operations Analytics department of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (the Netherlands) invites applications for a fully-funded four-year PhD position in Operations Research on “Optimizing Evacuation Decisions under Infrastructure Uncertainty”:

The PhD candidate will be supervised by Dr Pascal Wissink (VU Amsterdam, Department of Operations Analytics), in close collaboration with Dr Markus Leitner, Prof David Wozabal and Prof Bas Kolen (University of Amsterdam).

The position is part of the RESCUE project (The Resilience of Evacuation Strategies on Compromised and Unreliable Evacuation infrastructure), funded by the Dutch Research Council. The project develops multi-stage optimization models for pre-disaster evacuation decisions on critical road and shelter infrastructure subject to failures, combining distributionally robust and risk-averse approaches to stochastic programming.

The closing date for applications is 31 July 2026. Applications must be submitted through the VU job portal and include a CV, copies of transcripts, a writing sample (e.g. MSc thesis), and a brief description of your research interests.

Website URL: https://workingat.vu.nl/vacancies/phd-optimizing-evacuation-decisions-under-infrastructure-failure-amsterdam-1310955