The proposal

In one paragraph

I teach at ROC Nijmegen (MBO, Dutch secondary vocational education) and I’m finishing a Master’s in Applied AI. I want to do a PhD on AI-supported citizen neuroscience in vocational education: building and validating open-source sleep- and dream-monitoring tools together with my own students as co-researchers, extending Dreamento and the Donders Sleep & Memory Lab’s open-source line of work. OpenLucid is the proof that I can do the technical half of this myself.

Funded through

The NWO Doctoral Grant for Teachers: a scheme that lets a teacher with a permanent appointment do a funded PhD alongside teaching, with up to 0.4 fte released from teaching duties over five years. Deadline for this round: 20 January 2026.

Where it stands

Dr. Martin Dresler, at the Donders Institute, has been positive about the research idea itself. But his lab is pure neuroscience, and nobody there has an educational-science background — a real gap for a project whose other half is squarely about teaching and learning. I’m looking for someone to cover that half, as co-promotor or daily supervisor alongside him. NWO places no formal requirements on that role; only the main promotor needs a professorship at an eligible university.

What I bring

• OpenLucid — an open-source home sleep-EEG system I’m building myself, in public, day by day, mistakes included.
• Projectenplaats — a platform I built for ROC Nijmegen that connects students, teachers and companies around real projects, with built-in qualification tracking and AI-supported lessons.
• CodeFlow — the tool and study behind my Master’s thesis: a competency framework for human-AI collaboration in vocational software-development education, tested in a two-day AI-integrated hackathon with MBO students.

If this sounds interesting

I’d value ten minutes to talk — or a pointer to someone who might want to.