PHD Postion in Area of Causal Inference

The Department of Mathematics of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam welcomes applications for a fully-funded, 4-year PhD position in causal inference.

You will join the “Safe Causal Inference” consortium. Causal inference studies what assumptions are needed, and which methods you can use when those assumptions are met, to reliably conclude that “A causes B” and not just “A is correlated with B”. The consortium aims to incorporate all uncertainties into causal inferences, combining information obtained under alternative assumptions. In a team of 8 PhD researchers and 5 Principal Investigators located throughout the Netherlands, you’ll join us in developing a novel, iterative approach to causal inference that combines the strengths of subject-matter knowledge and the flexibility of data-driven algorithms.

You will work on the subproject “Triangulation of performance assessment methods for conditional causal quantities”. This PhD project investigates how to reliably assess the performance of estimators of conditional causal effects (such as CATE estimators and predictions under interventions). The core problem is that evaluating an estimator requires counterfactual outcomes in the evaluation dataset, but deriving those outcomes itself relies on causal assumptions, meaning the evaluation can be just as assumption-dependent as the estimator it's meant to assess.

You will examine whether combining evaluation results across different datasets, different causal assumptions, and different evaluation approaches (counterfactual, factual, and benchmarking against trials) leads to a more complete and reliable picture of a causal relationship. The goal is to develop a framework that helps data analysts choose the best evaluation strategy depending on which assumptions they are willing to make.

You will be jointly supervised by dr. Stéphanie van der Pas (VU), dr. Nan van Geloven (LUMC) and dr. Jeremy Labrecque (ErasmusMC). Your main working location will be the Mathematics department at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where you will join dr. Stéphanie van der Pas’ research group on causal inference.

We are an inclusive, interdisciplinary group, and diversity and internationalism is at the heart of our research principles, as well as our teaching practice.

The preferred starting date is: as soon as possible, ideally before 01.02.2027.

Applications from all groups currently under-represented in academic posts are especially encouraged. We particularly welcome applications from women and people with an ethnic minority background.

Your duties

• doing research towards writing a PhD thesis
• teaching tasks (roughly 15% of your time), for instance supervising exercise classes