Internship in Virtual Reality Experiments applied to urban health (f/m/d) - Ref: 25-08

The Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER)

is recruiting a

Master student in Virtual Reality Experiments applied to urban health (f/m/d)

• Ref: 25-08
• Internship agreement for 4-6 months
• Full-time (40 h/week)
• Start date between March 15th 2025 and April 30th 2025
• EU research framework program: Horizon ERC Starting Grant FragMent  

LISER invites highly qualified and motivated applicants for an internship position in the Urban Development and Mobility Department (UDM), under a project funded by the European Union, through Horizon European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant program.

About the FragMent project

Geographic environments, daily activities and stress: a study on the space-time fragmentation of exposure patterns.

Stress is nearly ubiquitous in everyday life, and imposes a tremendous burden worldwide by acting as a major risk factor of mental disorders, autoimmune, infectious and cardiovascular diseases, and some cancers. The aim of the FragMent project is to evaluate to which extent exposures to environments in daily life influences physiological and psychological stress, as well as social inequalities in stress.

Engaging in daily activities translates into travelling to and staying within a variety of environments over a day. According to the Stress Restorative theory, exposures to daily environments may either act as a contributor to stress or provide some restorative qualities. For example, while greener environments reduce stress, higher built-up density and proximity to traffic do the reverse. Yet, the combination of these momentary effects on stress over a day have so far been largely ignored. While being in a park for one hour may lower down the stress accumulated at the workplace, is it still the case if accessing the park means a difficult 10- minute walk with road crossings, loud noises, and high traffic intensity? Is it still relaxing if instead of reading alone in the park, you watch your kids so they don't hurt themselves or go too far? How does it depend on the activity carried out before, or the environment visited immediately after? How are these exposures and activities distributed across social groups? FragMent builds on a corpus of evidence from epidemiology, geography, and psychology to investigate the determinants of momentary, daily and chronic stress.

Supervision team

Dr. Camille Perchoux is a Research Associate at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER), department of Urban Development and Mobility. Dr. Perchoux is a health geographer with a background in geography and a PhD in Public Health epidemiology awarded in 2015 from Sorbonne University and the University of Montreal. Her research interests include the assessment of neighborhood effect on health at refined spatial and temporal scales, social and spatial inequalities in health, and longitudinal effects of environments on health. Her research involves the use interdisciplinary concepts, methods and tools from epidemiology, geography and transportation research including map-based questionnaires, GPS, (bio)sensors, mobile surveys and virtual reality technology. She is the principal investigator of the FragMent project.

Mr. Reza Aghanejad is a doctoral student involved in the FragMent project. He holds two master’s degrees in GIS and Remote Sensing from Tehran University and in Geography and Spatial Planning from the University of Luxembourg. His research interests concern assessing the effects of daily life environments on health and active mobility. He is also interested in issues related to GIS sciences, Immersive Virtual Environments (IVE), and Human-computer interactions.

Your Role

Contributing to the research effort on virtual reality experiments to examine the effects of urban environmental characteristics on stress

We aims to test the effect of the urban environments on momentary physiological and psychological stress while walking. We will make use of emerging virtual reality technologies combining immersive virtual environments with a walking simulator. Immersive Virtual environments will allow to control for and manipulate various environmental factors to systematically compare their effects on stress between several different temporal fragmentations of exposure patterns.

The successful candidate will be expected to contribute to the FragMent project as described above.

The selected candidate will be in charge of assisting the condution of one lab-based virtual experiment dedicated to the testing of stress biosensors and stress measurments in combination with the experimental setting, and the effect of specific environmental factors and the particiapnt stress responses.

The daily tasks include the conduction of the experiment with the 200 participants, and the analysis of the experiment data in collaboration with the team in charge.

Your Profile

The successful candidate is expected to have:

• Enrolled in a Master program in a relevant discipline such as geography, psychology, environmental psychology, public health, epidemiology or architecture ;
• Knowledge in experimental quantitative research methods ;
• Experience with Virtual Reality is considered as an asset, but not mandatory ;
• Experience in data management and statistics ;

• Interest for presenting research results to scientific conferences and workshops ;
• Good organizational and communication skills ;
• Ability to take own initiatives, as well as a strong ability for teamwork ;
• Fluency in English and French. Knowledge of German or Luxembourgish would be an asset, but not mandatory.

LISER particularly encourage female applicants to apply

We offer

An exciting interdisciplinary and international research environment combining geography, public health epidemiology and environmental sciences.

Application process

Please submit your complete application in English via https://jobs.liser.lu/jobs :

• Curriculum Vitae ;
• Letter of motivation (maximum 1 page) ;
• Copy of the last obtained diploma and transcripts (i.e., bachelor) ;
• Contact details of two referees (no recommendation letters).

Please note that this position will remain open until filled

If you have any questions on the contents of the internship, please contact Dr. Camille PERCHOUX at camille.perchoux@liser.lu

For administrative matters, please contact Mrs Vanya KIROVA at recruitment@liser.lu  

Why LISER?

LISER is a publicly funded research institute located in Luxembourg and dedicated to applied empirical research in economic, social and spatial sciences. The Institute attracts top researchers from all over the world and high-level student training is a vibrant part of the Institute’s activities. LISER staff consists of approx. 200 employees, about 60% of the staff being researchers; mainly from the fields of economics, geography and sociology. The vision of the institute is to be a socio-economic research institute internationally recognised, focused on scientific excellence and societal impact, able to contribute through multi-disciplinary and intersectoral research, in an active and inclusive way to a sustainable and inclusive society at national and international level.

The institute is located on the new Belval campus in the south of Luxembourg (Cité des Sciences, Luxembourg), which hosts the University of Luxembourg and a substantial part of the country’s publicly funded research facilities, i.e. LISER, the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) cross-national data centre, the Luxembourg institutes of Health (LIH) and of Science and Technology (LIST). Information on research in Luxembourg is accessible via the national EURAXESS platform.

LISER is an Equal Opportunity Employer