The EU TransPharm project aims to support the transition towards the production and use of more sustainable pharmaceuticals. TransPharm will develop a new methodology to assess the sustainability of pharmaceuticals over their entire life cycle, building upon existing approaches of lifecycle assessment (LCA) and chemical risk assessment. The methodology will integrate sustainability aspects related to the design, production and distribution of pharmaceuticals with those related to the use and disposal, including risk mitigation measures. The methodology will build upon the latest scientific insights and be specifically tailored to the needs of potential users such as regulators, industry and the health sector. Our specific objectives are:
• To map out the value chain of pharmaceuticals, identify environmental impacts and sustainability issues, and decide in collaboration with stakeholders which issues should be included in the integrated sustainability assessment.
• To develop methodological innovations to improve the sustainability assessment of the entire pharmaceutical value chain, addressing specific challenges such as scarcity of life cycle inventory (LCI) data, lacking characterisation factors for ecotoxicity, spatial distribution of the value chain and the inclusion of socioeconomic considerations.
• To integrate the innovations for sustainability assessment and demonstrate how this approach can be operationalised in practice, for instance in procurement, market approval and production planning.

The above-mentioned tasks will be performed in close collaboration between the postdoctoral researcher, two PhD candidates and several other TransPharm project partners. As a postdoctoral researcher, you will play an important role in the supervision of the PhD candidates and the coordination of the research activities in TransPharm. Furthermore you will be expected to align the TransPharm research activities with new developments in the safe-and-sustainable-by-design (SSbD) field taking place within the ES cluster (i.e. a new Assistant Professor of SSbD and a new collaborative project with the EC Joint Research Centre) and beyond.