There is a temporary PhD position for 3 years available at the Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management – Section Managerial Economics, Finance and Operation Research. The position is resident at NTNUs campus in Trondheim. This is an educational position, which will provide promising research recruits the opportunity for professional development through studies towards a PhD-degree. The position is connected to the PhD program at the Faculty of Economics and Management and the faculty will be your employer.
The department endeavors to promote research that meets high International standards. Subsequently, contact with International institutions is important. Therefore, the department encourages the successful PhD Candidate to spend one to two semesters of the contract period at a foreign university. The department offers support in the planning of such scholarly visits.
The mission of Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management is to carry out education and research activities at a high international level in the intersection between technology/natural sciences and business economics, management, and HSE to promote sustainable value creation in technology-based areas in industry, business, and public sector organizations in Norway.
About the position
The maritime sector is a key part of the global energy transition, but decarbonizing it presents major challenges—ranging from the high cost of green fuels and uncertain infrastructure availability to the lack of viable business models. Despite this complexity and the deep uncertainty around future technologies, fuel supply chains, and regulatory developments, the sector is often treated too simplistically in energy system and integrated assessment models, limiting their ability to inform robust transition strategies and policy.
This PhD project aims to close that gap by developing new methods and extending existing modeling frameworks to better capture the role of maritime transport in energy system models. The primary focus will be on the European level, while results will be validated and contextualized using both global and regional modeling frameworks. The project will likely build on the European energy system model EMPIRE, which can be extended and linked with the maritime fleet model MariTEAM to represent vessel technologies and fuel choices. Insights and data from the global model MESSAGEix can support consistency in assumptions on fuel availability, costs, and trade dynamics.
The research will analyze transition pathways across national, regional (short-sea), and global (deep-sea) scales, focusing on when and where infrastructure and fuel supply may emerge, how quickly they can scale, and at what cost. It will consider system-level constraints, retrofitting, fuel flexibility, and emerging technologies such as CCS and nuclear. A key research question is how robust maritime decarbonization strategies can be identified under long-term uncertainty in fuels, infrastructure, and policy. The work requires developing and applying large-scale optimization-based energy system models.
About the project
FME MarTrans is a Norwegian R&D centre for Maritime Energy Transition. It is an eight-year collaborative project with 65 partners within maritime industry and research, funded by the Research Council of Norway under the Research Centre for Environment-friendly Energy (FME) program. The focus is on research, innovation and education to accelerate the energy transition within the shipping industry, while increasing value creation and exports for the Norwegian maritime industry. With total funding from the Research Council of Norway and the industrial partners of over NOK 300 million, this is the world’s largest maritime research program of its kind
Duties of the position
• Execute a PhD project within 3 years (including formal analysis and dissemination).
• Carry out research on a high international level
• Complete the necessary doctoral coursework as per NTNU’s guidelines.
• Attend project meetings and develop a collaboration network with project partners.
• Disseminate research findings through national/international academic conferences and open access scientific journals that meet the requirements for the PhD position.
Qualification requirements
• The qualification requirement is completion of a master’s degree or second degree (equivalent to 120 credits) in operations research, industrial engineering, marine technology, energy systems, applied mathematics or equivalent education within the areas relevant to the project. Applicants should have a strong academic background with a grade of B or better in terms of NTNU’s grading scale. Applicants with no letter grades from previous studies must have an equally good academic foundation.
• The position requires excellent English oral and writing skills.
In addition, the following qualifications will contribute positively to the evaluation of the applicant:
• Background and/or experience relevant to the project topic
• Scandinavian language skills
• Documented experience with quantitative modeling, operations research, decision making under uncertainty, and systems analysis
• Documented experience/interest in maritime transport and the energy transition
• Proficiency in at least one programming language, e.g. Python, Julia, C++, or Java.
Recent graduates, or applicants who are in the final stage of their Master’s program, are encouraged to apply. Such an applicant may be offered the position under the condition that the diploma will show satisfactory final term results.
Please read more here: https://www.jobbnorge.no/ledige-stillinger/stilling/280434
Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management
IØT has challenging and inspiring educational programmes and research projects in the cross-disciplinary field of technology management. Through its programmes of study, IØT educates candidates with a solid technological basis in methodology and theory on how to develop and manage technologically based organisations.
Participation in, and development of, research projects in close co-operation with Norwegian industry, the department is also developing models, tools and methods for how to manage Norwegian industry.
