PHD Candidate in Mechanism-informed World Models and Agents

Page contents
1 Jul 2026
University of Amsterdam (UvA) Research Field
Computer science » Informatics
Computer science » Programming
Engineering » Computer engineering
Engineering » Control engineering Researcher Profile
First Stage Researcher (R1) Application Deadline
20 Jul 2026 - 21:59 (UTC) Country
Netherlands Type of Contract
Temporary Job Status
Not Applicable Hours Per Week
38.0 Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme?
Not funded by a EU programme Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure?
No
Offer Description
Want to teach machines the mechanisms behind how the world changes - and build agents that act on them?
Join us!
World models are controllable, physics- and mechanism-grounded simulators of reality: they let an agent rehearse the consequences of its actions thousands of times before it acts in the real world. Paired with agents that plan, reason and act inside them, they are emerging as the substrate of Physical AI - and they cut across domains that look different on the surface but share the same scientific core: a robot rehearsing a manipulation task in a digital twin, and a biomedical model simulating how a tumour responds to therapy across biological scales, are both betting that structure beats brute scale.
In this PhD you will develop mechanism-informed world models: models that do not merely predict the next frame, but discover the underlying events, causes and temporal relationships that drive change - and expose them as controllable, intervenable structure. The question is not only "what happens next?" but "what are the latent actions and mechanisms, and how do we tokenize, learn and steer them in a controllable manner?" This is one of the least-explored and most consequential frontiers in Physical AI.
This is what you will do
You will help define and build the next generation of world models and the agents that act in them. Con...