Govert Valkenburg

This PhD Research Fellow position is based in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture (KULT) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. The project sits at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS), infrastructure studies, security, and resilience, and is part of NTNU’s broader More Resilient Society initiative. The successful candidate will join the multidisciplinary STRIDE project, which develops a dynamic, multi-risk modeling framework for understanding and improving the resilience of Norway’s transport infrastructure. The research context brings together civil engineering, artificial intelligence, operations research, and STS in a collaborative cross-faculty team. The project addresses both climate-driven hazards such as floods and landslides and geopolitical threats such as sabotage, with an emphasis on maintaining critical transport functionality under stress. The PhD work is explicitly situated in the social and sociotechnical analysis of infrastructure. The student will focus on how knowledge is integrated across academic domains, how concepts such as comprehensive resilience are operationalized in a multidisciplinary setting, and how infrastructures and their vulnerabilities are interpreted and analyzed. The post offers a strong research environment within KULT, a department known in part for STS research and active across equality/diversity and science and technology studies. As a PhD researcher, the candidate will also become part of research communities at NTNU, including the newly established Security Studies group, the university-wide Security Narratives group, and the Center for Climate, Energy and the Environment (CLEEN). The role includes opportunities for publication, conference participation, possible research stays abroad, and contribution to broader academic and societal dissemination. The position is embedded in a highly interdisciplinary and international environment, with supervision arranged through a daily supervisor at the department and one or more co-supervisors from the project team.