DWSF Laureates 2020-2021
The LNVH board and bureau are pleased to announce the 2020-21 Distinghuished Women Scientists Fund laureates! In celebration of LNVH’s 20th anniversary, this year not 6 – but 7 laureates will receive the DWSF travel grant. This travel grant allows the laureates to travel abroad for their research.
Luisa Schneider is an Assistant Professor at VU Amsterdam, where she specializes in the anthropology of intimacy, violence and law. With the travel grant, she will travel to Sierra Leone, to further her collaboration with judges, NGOs and grassroots on a study about the riot that occurred after a man who was tested positively for COVID-19 was brought to the country’s central prison for men, Pademba Road to be imprisoned.
Chiara Sironi is a postdoctoral researcher at Maastricht University, Department of Data Science & Knowledge Engineering. With the travel grant, she will be visiting the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), Shenzhen, China. During this visit, she will extend her earlier research topic of self-adaptive search algorithms that are able to address a wide variety of (video) games without requiring human intervention or prior, game-specific knowledge. This research will be extended to include automatic generation of new algorithms, with application not only to games, but also to real world problems. This would bring her research closer to Artificial General Intelligence, which aims at creating agents that are able to perform many heterogeneous tasks in a wide variety of domains, of which games are only a subset. (Click for video portrait)
Oihane Abiega is a postdoctoral researcher at the Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. With the travel grant, she will visit the Center for Brain and Disease Research, VIB-KU Leuven (Belgium) to perform single-cell RNA sequencing to molecularly characterize the reactive-neural stem cell (react-NSC) population in the hippocampus of epileptic mice. These react-NSCs lose their neurogenic function and contribute to some of the main pathological hallmarks of Epilepsy. This experiment will be key in her research project and a big step forward in our understanding of what drives the change of normal NSCs into react-NSCs and how to specifically target them, effectively contributing to their use as future therapeutic target.
Ona Ilozumba is a postdoctoral researcher/lecturer at the Athena Institute at VU Amsterdam. With the travel grant, she will conduct fieldwork within the context of her existing project at the Uganda Cancer Institute. The projects objective is to develop, implement and evaluate an Interactive Voice System (IVR) for cancer awareness in Uganda. The trip would involve a qualitative evaluation (interviews and focus group discussion with current system users) to understand users experiences, in order to guide further modification of the system. Additionally, she will explore preferred avenues for the promotion of the IVR system to increase the utilization of the system by the general public. (Click for video portrait)
Noortje Kloos is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Twente and Radboudumc, within the field of positive psychology and long-term care for older adults. With the travel grant, she will be working on two lines of research during a four-month stay at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. First, she will be testing a gratitude app (developed at the University of Twente) to improve the well-being of nurses. This will consist of an RCT to test the effectiveness and acceptability of the app for nurses from the Austin Hospital Melbourne. Secondly, she will be participating in an ongoing research on the concept of thriving in older adults: the experienced well-being in the nursing home. Dr. Kloos will join both the analysis of an existing large Swedish dataset, as well as the gathering of new data in two nursing homes in Australia. (Click for video portrait)
Fabiola Müller is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Amsterdam University Medical Centers (department of Medical Psychology) where she conducts research in psycho-oncology. In the Netherlands, individuals from ethnic minority groups are expected to form an increasing proportion of those diagnosed with cancer. However, research on the need for, and efficacy of supportive care in cancer patients from minority groups is scarce in the Netherlands. In the USA, research on ethnic minority groups is much more advanced. With the travel grant, Dr. Müller will visit the Moffitt Cancer Center (Tampa, Florida), which has a large portfolio of research evaluating the role of ethnicity in cancer survivorship and supportive care. Dr. Müller will analyze data on survivorship needs and care in the context of ethnicity, and receive guidance on the challenges and opportunities of assessing ethnicity and socio-cultural factors. She will transfer her gained knowledge and skills to the Netherlands where she aims to conduct research on equity in supportive care in cancer in the Dutch context. (Click for video portrait)
Charlotte Bekker, PhD, is a researcher at Radboudumc, at the department of Pharmacy. With the travel grant, she will visit a research group at the University of Sydney, Australia. Together with the head of the research group, she will work on a new project, focusing on the advancement of research methodologies for medication adherence. The project results will enable researchers to adequately design, conduct and report on high quality studies for medication adherence.