DWSF Laureates 2019
The LNVH board is pleased to announce the 2019 Distinghuished Women Scientists Fund. This travel grant allows the laureates to travel abroad for their research.
- Anna Schueth is a postdoctoral researcher at Maastricht University, where she works on on optical clearing and light-sheet fluorescence microscopic (LSFM) imaging of large human brain samples for deep imaging of human cortical structures. Her work on LSFM of the optically cleared human brain has been well received in the scientific LSFM community. With the travel grant she will visit the renowned European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy (LENS) at the University of Florence, Italy, which is hosting leading experts in optics, LSFM and neuro-imaging with a vast knowledge in these fields and a proven track record, such as numerous influential high-impact publications. During her stay, she will perform neuro-LSFM imaging experiments, followed by data analysis using in-house developed software and analysis pipelines.
- Kaya Peerdeman is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at Leiden University. Her research is focused on enhancing our understanding of the mechanisms of placebo and nocebo effects (e.g., expectancies, learning processes such as conditioning and instructions, and physiological correlates) on pain and other physical symptoms. The travel grant will allow her to visit the worldwide acclaimed neuroscientist Prof. dr. Christian Büchel and members from his renowned lab at the Institute of Systems Neuroscience of the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf in Hamburg, Germany. There, she will collaboratively develop a concrete research plan, that builds on her two recent innovative psychophysiological experiments. In these experiments she examined the limits of positive expectancy effects (the core mechanism of placebo effects) on pain.
- Lucía Berro Pizzarossa is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Groningen, where she is researching the intersection of gender, health and law in relation to smoking during pregnancy. This travel grant allows her to visit the Centre for Public Health Law Research at the University of Temple, where she will collaborate on a project which focuses on self-managed abortion with medication. This is an emerging topic of crucial importance in the field of sexual and reproductive rights that have garnered the attention of agencies such as the WHO and that is currently underexplored from a human rights perspective.
- Maria Luce Lupetti is a postdoctoral researcher at TUDelft. She is conducting her research as a postdoctoral fellow at AiTech, a mission-oriented science, design, engineering and business innovation initiative, focused on autonomous technology and human responsibility in digital societies. Her research is focused on how to shape appropriate forms of interaction in the design of human partnership with AI. With this travel grant, she will have the opportunity of investigating current approaches and experiences at the intersection between design and AI at KAIST University in South Korea.
- Sarah Burke is a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University, where she is involved in the longitudinal "Brainlinks" study on brain development in relation to prosocial behavior during adolescence. The travel fund will allow her to visit the lab of Dr. Jamie Feusner, Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioural Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles. Given Dr. Feusner’s expertise in psychiatric conditions that involve distortions of body perception (anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder), his excellent technical resources and lab support, allowing for sophisticated data analyses, a visit to his lab will result in a fruitful exchange ideas for a new fMRI experiment that focuses on developmental changes in own-body perception in gender diverse youth.
- Lieke Melsen is an assistant professor at Wageningen University & Research. Her research focusses on uncertainty in hydrological models. Hydrological models are frequently used to support decision making, for instance related to dike heightening and flood mitigation measures. The travel grant will give her the opportunity to visit The Helmholtz Zentrum für Umweltforschung (UFZ) in Leipzig. The UFZ has developed a computational infrastructure to perform multi-model runs over the whole European domain. There, she will get acquainted with their infrastructure and data, and run the MMF using this infrastructure over the European domain, which will be highly useful to obtain insights in spatial patterns of model structure uncertainty.