The Department of Food Science, Section for Food Design and Consumer Behaviour, invites applicants for a PhD fellowship in Contextual effects on consumer choice behavior.
Start date is expected to be February 1st 2024 or as soon as possible thereafter.
The deadline for applications is 15 October 2023 23:59 GMT +2.
The project
The PhD is part of a Novo Nordisk funded project led by Associate Professor Qian Janice Wang. Overall, the project aims to promote consumer behaviour change towards more sustainable food choices and consumption. Specifically, the PhD project will use a combination of virtual/physical retail spaces and biometric technology (e.g., eyetracking) to better understand and predict consumer food choice behaviour in both online and offline scenarios. A focus will be to manipulate context, defined as multisensory environmental elements as well as cognitive messaging, to study implicit and explicit consumer reactions and purchase behaviour. This research will help address the need to understand the drivers to shift consumer habits towards healthier and lower planetary footprint diets.
The candidate
The Department is looking for candidates within the field(s) of food science, experimental psychology, behavioural sciences, cognitive neuroscience, marketing, or similar. It is an advantage to have previous work or research experience with human subjects in behavioural experiments. Experience with Virtual Reality or biometric methods (e.g., eyetracking, facial expression analysis, EEG) is also an advantage. The candidate should have a curious and creative mind-set with a strong interest to learn new disciplines and technologies. It is also necessary to possess excellent data analysis, communication, presentation, and academic writing skills in English.
Qualifications needed for the regular programme
To be eligible for the regular PhD programme, you must have completed a degree programme, equivalent to a Danish master’s degree (180 ECTS/3 FTE BSc + 120 ECTS/2 FTE MSc) related to the subject area of the project, e.g. Food Science, Psychological and Behavioural Sciences, Marketing, or Data Science. For information of eligibility of completed programmes, see General assessments for specific countries and Assessment database.
Principal supervisor is Associate Professor Qian Janice Wang