NWO has funded the Large-Scale Research Infrastruture (LSRI) project titled “Macroscope”. In this €16.7M project involving many universities in the Netherlands, including Leiden University, the aim is to build the world’s first population-level research infrastructure designed to observe and understand how societies change over time. The project is lead by ODISSEI, with whom I also extensively collaborate as part of the ongoing PLANET-NL initiative. Within the Macroscope project, I will be responsible for a task on large-scale graph analytics.
As part of this project, in 2026 I will be hiring a postdoc who will develop and validate novel network metrics, algorithms and baseline tests for longitudinal, population-scale social networks, in particular applicable to population-scale microdata from Statistics Netherlands, such as the population-scale social network and firm network data. Topics may include network topography, community detection, and dynamic change detection (e.g., early warning signals, polarisation, echo chambers). A job ad will go out early 2026, but excellent candidates close to obtaining or already holding a PhD and with a track record in network science are invited to reach out.