The UvA and Amsterdam UMC laureates:

Amsterdam Law School
 

• Dr Rodrigo Vallejo (Private Law): Twin-Law: An Experimentalist Law for the European Green and Digital Transitions
  Fostering the green and digital transitions have become existential policy challenges. But the interdependencies of these challenges urgently requires their ‘twinning’ to succeed. Vallejo’s project elaborates an experimentalist, synthetic study that fills this gap, by interconnecting the EU ‘Green Deal’ and ‘Digital Age’ legal-regulatory models that are guiding the European twin transition. This will enable judges, policymakers, and researchers to dynamically appraise the powers and responsibilities of key co-regulatory authorities across the green/digital divide and further develop an integral European policy model that can inspire this ‘twin transition’ elsewhere in the world.

Faculty of Economics and Business
 

• Dr Thomas Douenne (Ecomomics): On the design of climate policy: improving fairness and public support.
  Climate change is one of the most important challenges facing society. Yet climate policies often fail to win public support due to their high and unevenly distributed costs. Douenne’s research will use survey-experiments to understand how people think about climate policies and inequality, as well as macro-modelling tools to better understand how climate policy and inequality interact. More specifically, the aim is to answer the following question: How can we design climate policies that are fair and supported by the public?
   
• Dr Albert Jan Hummel (Economics): Designing labour-market policies when firms are heterogeneous
  In many Western countries, over the past decades income inequality has increased while the share of national income that goes to labour has decreased. To understand these trends, differences between firms, for instance in their productivity or how much market power they can exert, play a crucial role. However, little is known about the effects of labour-market policies on things like wages and employment if differences between firms are taken into account. Hummel’s project aims to shed light on these effects, and the consequences for labour-market policies aimed at reducing income inequality.

Faculty of Humanities
 

• Dr Josephine van den Bent (History): Ethnicity in the Medieval Middle East
  Like today, the medieval Middle East was a multicultural, multi-ethnic society. This project investigates how people viewed ethnicity and ethnic difference in those days, and what social consequences ethnic difference could have. By studying examples of contact between different ethnic groups in Abbasid Iraq (8th-10th century), Mamluk Egypt and Syria (13th-15th century), and Iran under the Mongols (13th-14th century), we gain a better understanding of the histories of these societies, as well as gaining insight in how people in these societies shaped and used ethnicity.

Faculty of Medicine (Amsterdam UMC, location AMC)
 

• Dr Marry Smit: Picture perfect ventilation: Lung imaging for personalized treatment of acute respiratory distress syndrome
  About one in three patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome does not survive the intensive care. Personalising ventilation based on lung images can significantly improve survival rates. However, it is currently too challenging to assess these images accurately, and the reason why personalized ventilation is beneficial is unclear. The researcher aims to address this by developing a useful tool for automatically and effectively analysing lung images. Additionally, Smit will investigate why personalised ventilation is effective in patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome. This could lead to a substantial improvement in personalized ventilation and its application in intensive care.
   
• Dr Fons van den Berg: Gut microbes in acute pancreatitis; a potential novel medicine?
  Gut microbes play an important role in severe complications of acute pancreatitis, such as infections and organ failure. We do not know in detail how this works. Van den Berg will research which host-pathogen interactions are imporant and how we can use this in the future to our advantage to prevent patients becoming severily ill.
   
• Dr Nick van Es: Mitigating accelerated atherosclerosis induced by immune checkpoint inhibitors in cancer patients
  Immune checkpoint inhibitors have revolutionized cancer treatment and are used by many patients worldwide. However, there are growing concerns about the increased risk of cardiovascular disease induced by this drugs. Van Es’ project aims to unravel the mechanism and find ways to mitigate the risk.
   
• Dr Abraham Meijnikman: Targeting Endogenous Ethanol Production to Alleviate MASLD
  Everyone produces a certain amount of alcohol in their intestines, but patients with metabolic dysfunction associated steatotic liver disease generate abnormally high levels of alcohol. This can cause damage to the intestines, as well as the liver and other parts of the body. The precise mechanism by which endogenously produced alcohol causes harm is not yet fully understood. Meijnikman will investigate how endogenous alcohol contributes to the formation of senescent cells in the intestine, which can trigger inflammatory responses in the body. He will test interventions that reduce alcohol production in the gut and clear senescent cells, with studies conducted in both mice and humans.
   
• Dr Patrick de Jonge: On bacteriophage evolution and ecology in the human gut
  Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria. Trillions of bacteriophages reside in the human gut, where they infect bacteria that are involved in human health and disease. This interplay between gut bacteriophages and bacteria is dynamic, but almost nothing is known about its development over time. To better understand this, De Jonge will study how bacteriophages evolve. He will specifically study the gut when it is unbalanced, for example after surgery, because this is when evolution is at its most rapid. The results will be important for future medical use of bacteriophages and medical procedures that involve the gut.

Faculty of Science
 

• Dr Alberto Pérez de Alba Ortíz (Computational Chemistry): PLASTIC-JUNC: Predicting nanoPLASTIC risks to animal JUNCtional protein integrity
  Nanoplastics are specks of plastic a million times smaller than a millimeter. Recently, researchers found nanoplastics in our food, organs and even in the placenta. Nanoplastic accumulation can lead to organ failure and reduced coordination and memory in different animals. Scientists do not yet understand how nanoplastics trespass the protective cell layer around our organs, the endothelium. Pérez will use computer simulations to discover how nanoplastics weaken key adhesive, i.e., junctional, proteins in the endothelium. Using artificial intelligence Pérez can obtain insights about these processes and identify the most damaging nanoplastics; providing valuable information for biomedicine and public health.
   
• Dr Benjamin Robira (Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics): Unravelling the paradox of restricted navigation in a changing world
  In the shade of the rainforests of the Congo Basin or under the Namibian desert sun, many primates move mostly along habitually travelled paths: routes. Why do they do so? In heterogeneous and changing environments, it seems paradoxical to restrict movement, and thereby exploration and resource-finding opportunities. By integrating cutting-edge tracking, virtual-reality, and modelling technologies, Robira’s project aims to elucidate the causes and consequences of primate route systems. Drawing on the collaborative efforts of primatologists worldwide, it will also foster the operationalisation of an international primate navigation consortium to promote data sharing and intellectual exchange on primate movement and behaviour.
   
• Dr Vasilis Tseliou (Van 't Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences): Stereoselective Synthesis of Amines via Photoexcitation of Enzyme-Substrate Complexes
  Amines are crucial building blocks in the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries but controlling their geometry during synthesis, especially when multiple stereocenters must be formed simultaneously, is intricate and resource-demanding, thereby affecting practicality and economic feasibility. Tseliou will use light to unlock new reaction pathways within the active sites of enzymes, enabling the one-step synthesis of amine compounds featuring multiple stereocenters by using a single catalyst. Unlike established photoenzymatic processes, the new artificial photoenzyme will operate without the need for any cofactor, thus opening new avenues for reaction invention.
   
• Dr John van de Wetering (Informatics Institute): A diagrammatic toolbox for quantum circuit simulation
  Van de Wetering will use a language of diagrams, the ZX-calculus, to unify different approaches to simulating quantum computations, which will allow for larger simulations. He will then use the connection of quantum simulation to condensed-matter physics and logical-formula solving to find areas where these improved techniques will lead to better algorithms. In this way we bring these fields closer together.
   
• Dr Iris van der Giessen (Institute for Logic, Language and Computation): Computing interpolants: cyclic proofs in action
  Interpolation plays an important role in mathematical logic and computer science. It is a method of separating statements into different categories. It is for example used to restrict databases to a user-specified domain. Interpolation does not work in every logic. The researcher will develop new mathematical techniques to characterize criteria under which interpolation works and applies these results to solve questions about interpolation in the theory of knowledge bases.
   
• Dr Jan Willem de Gee (Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences): Neuromodulatory weighing of prior beliefs in perception and decision-making
  Predictions inform almost all our decisions. For example, when choosing the bike over the bus, based on the predicted duration and weather conditions. But what happens when unexpected changes in the world render our predictions invalid? For example, nearby roadworks result in a longer-than-predicted trip duration. This research project uses a new and multidisciplinary approach to uncover the brain circuits that mediate the flexible updating of prior beliefs. This will lead to fundamental insights about consciousness and decision-making as well as applications in the realm of medical psychology.
   
• Dr Eva Laplace (Anton Pannekoek Instituut): Aiming for the massive stars: understanding the progenitors of black holes and supernovae in the Gaia, LIGO, and LSST era
  Through their strong winds and explosions, massive stars enrich the Universe with the building blocks of life, including the carbon in our cells and the oxygen we breathe. However, not every massive star explodes; some form black holes. Moreover, we now know that most massive stars live with close companion stars that can change their fate and could lead to universal signals. With the recent discovery of gravitational waves, stars with invisible companions, and automated observations of exploding stars, astrophysicists can finally test the existence of these signals and better understand the final fate of massive stars.

Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences
 

• Dr Tessa Blanken (Psychology): Sleep well, sleep tight: Unravelling sleep restriction therapy to promote sleep health and well-being
  Sleep is strongly linked to how we feel. If we sleep poorly for long periods, there is a high risk of psychological and physiological complaints. Despite evidence-based sleep restriction therapy, 50% does not benefit and we do not sufficiently understand how different processes interact to promote healthy sleep. In this project, Blanken will integrate clinical data, mathematical models of sleep and theories of treatment into a formal model. With this model, we can better understand how different processes interact to govern healthy sleep and identify opportunities to improve treatment.
   
• Dr Noah van Dongen (Psychology): The next step in methodological innovation: Open and collaborative theory development
  Although proposals for theory development methodology have been published and several successful attempts at theory specification have been made, psychological science still lacks a coordinated program for theory development. We have the momentum and resources to take the next step in methodological innovation: building a theoretical program that can match the prowess of empirical research design and statistical methods. Van Dongen will take the first leap forward in creating methodology for collaborative theory development, extending open-science and team-science efforts into the realm of scientific theory.
   
• Dr Gianna Eick (Political Science): Social investment and migration
  Welfare chauvinism, or the opposition to social policies for migrants and refugees, is at the heart of current political conflicts. This project explores social investment as a way to overcome welfare chauvinism. This is because social investment policies (such as education, childcare, labour market activation) can be empowering and protecting, preventing challenging life transitions from becoming long-term disadvantages and resulting in socio-economic benefits for the broader society. Through a mixed-methods design, Eick’s project examines the entire life cycle of various social-investment policies for different migrant and refugee groups, from their very foundation to their public resonance and outcomes for recipients.
   
• Dr Micha Heilbron (Brain and Cognition): Understanding language comprehension in large language models and the human mind
  The rise of large language models (LLMs, e.g. ChatGPT), has sparked a heated debate in cognitive science about the potential of these models for the study of human language processing. Heilbron’s project aims to address this question by exploring whether LLMs understand meaning similarly to humans; by dissecting LLMs’ surprising ability to predict brain activity; and by training them in more human-like ways. These findings will provide insights into the potential of these models for cognitive science and will help advance our understanding of both AI and human cognition.
   
• Dr Jessica Soedirgo (Political Science): Resisting Forced Assimilation in Postcolonial Indonesia: The Case of Chinese Indonesians
  Forced assimilation has been recognized by international law as a violation of human rights. How do minorities respond to forced assimilation? When do they comply and when do they resist? Soedirgo’s project examines these questions by looking at Chinese Indonesians, who were subjected to forced assimilation following Indonesia’s independence. Using archival data and interviews, this project studies why some Chinese Indonesians were able to preserve their culture, while others were not. Understanding how minorities can resist coercive nation building can help practitioners better support contemporary minorities facing forced assimilation.
   
• Dr Joanna Strycharz (Communication): Digital vulnerabilities – are only certain groups vulnerable in the digital society?
  Companies collect and process large amounts of data about individuals online. They use this data to make their communication more persuasive through personalising messages. Such personalisation is impactful as it can decide who gets to see information and opportunities online and allows companies to strike the right chords by persuading individuals in the most effective way. This means that everyone can be vulnerable to exclusion from information and manipulation online when their data is used for targeting. Strycharz’s project studies this new type of vulnerabilities and explores protection individuals need in the digital society.