Research Hardware Engineer | Mosquito Behavior & Open Hardware

Job Description

Job description

Are you a bridge builder between technology and science? Do you believe that the future of innovation lies in sharing knowledge rather than protecting it? As a Research Hardware Engineer for the OSHNED project (Open-source Hardware Infrastructure for The Netherlands), you will play a key role in transforming Dutch science into an open ecosystem — while building the next generation of instrumentation for mosquito behavior research at Radboud University Medical Center.

At Radboud University Medical Center you will be embedded in the Hol group (Quantitative Mosquito Biology) at the Department of Medical Microbiology, where we use biophysics, engineering, and machine vision to understand what makes mosquitoes such efficient disease vectors.

Understanding mosquito behavior is key to curbing the spread of mosquito-borne diseases. Instruments that can quantify how mosquitoes smell, move, bite, and transmit pathogens are important tools in this battle. You will design, build, and document those instruments — and, critically, ensure that they do not end up on a dusty shelf, but are given a second life as an open-source method within the OSHNED national infrastructure.

You work at the intersection of technology, life-science research, and community management. You inform, encourage, and help researchers, students, and teachers at Radboudumc to adopt open hardware, and you form an active connection with the other OSHNED Research Hardware Engineers at TU/e, TU Delft, Utrecht University, Wageningen University & Research, and the Netherlands eScience Center.

Your duties and responsibilities

• Developing mosquito-behavior instrumentation. Together with researchers in the Hol group you design and prototype behavior assays — imaging arenas, environmental-control rigs, sensor platforms, and machine-vision setups — to characterize mosquito biology. You take projects from concept to working hardware, and you make them reproducible by others.
• Making research projects open and FAIR. You support Radboudumc researchers and students to release their hardware and co-develop documentation in line with community standards. You identify and curate hardware designs across Radboudumc and assist creators in adding those to appropriate repositories.
• Teaching and outreach. Through lectures, workshops, and tutorials you familiarize students, PIs, and lecturers with open-source hardware and get them excited to make open science the standard. You actively promote open hardware.
• Events & management. You co-organize an annual Open Hardware Hackathon and training sessions for the Radboudumc community, and you manage the local fablab.

Place of work

You will be based at Radboud University Medical Center (Radboudumc) in Nijmegen, embedded in the Hol group within the Department of Medical Microbiology. The group studies what makes mosquitoes such efficient disease vectors. By combining biophysics, engineering, and machine vision, we develop new ways to quantify mosquito behavior — from how individual mosquitoes find and bite a host, to how populations respond to environmental cues — with the aim of informing better strategies against malaria, dengue, and other mosquito-borne diseases. The lab has a strong culture of building custom instrumentation, sharing data, and collaborating across disciplines.

The OSHNED project
This position is part of OSHNED (Open-source Hardware Infrastructure for The Netherlands), an ambitious initiative funded by Open Science NL that integrates successful open-hardware efforts in the Netherlands into a robust national infrastructure. OSHNED maintains a centralized digital repository of open hardware designs, provides training and capacity building, and curates existing open-source hardware across the consortium. The OSHNED consortium consists of Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), TU Delft, Utrecht University, Wageningen University & Research, Radboud University Medical Center, and the Netherlands eScience Center.