KNAW Early Career Awards for two Leiden researchers
Young Leiden researchers Alisa van de Haar and Marleen Kunneman have received a KNAW Early Career Award. The prize, awarded annually for outstanding achievements, consists of 15,000 euros and a unique work of art.
The KNAW Early Career Award is for researchers in the Netherlands at the beginning of their careers who have innovative, original ideas. This year, a total of 12 young researchers from various Dutch universities will receive the award. The laureates represent a wide range of academic disciplines and embody a broad spectrum of research areas. What are the two award-winning Leiden researchers:
Alisa van de Haar - French influences on Early Modern Dutch
Van de Haar investigates multilingualism in the early modern Low Countries by studying literary publications, archival material and other sources. She nuances the common scholarly view that French influences were displaced from Early Modern Dutch because of nationalistic feelings, and shows that French actually had many users during this period and regularly served as inspiration for Dutch. In other research, she offers an innovative perspective on the relationship between migration and language, seeing language differences not only as an obstacle but also as something that can benefit both migrants and receiving communities.
Alisa van de Haar is an assistant professor of historical French literature at the Faculty of Humanities.
Marleen Kunneman - cooperation between patients and health care providers
Kunneman explores how patients and their care providers cooperate in creating implementable care plans that fit in seamlessly with what patients need. She leads the international Making Care Fit Collaborative, a partnership she founded herself with patients, family caregivers, researchers, care designers and policy makers . Her research shows that the focus of doctor-patient collaboration is often on following proper procedures at the expense of the human aspects of care, leading to situations in which clinicians ‘deliver care’ without actually ‘caring’.
Marleen Kunneman is an assistant professor of medical decision making at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC).
The other award-winning research focuses on immune responses to infections, atmospheric loss in exoplanets, teaching literature in the Netherlands and the impact of crises on human well-being, among others.
Photo: Unsplash
About the KNAW Early Career Award
The KNAW Early Career Award is being presented for the fifth time this year and consists of a cash prize of 15,000 euros. Laureates can use this sum at their discretion for the benefit of their own research career. All laureates will also receive the art object Extended Jewellery by Laura Klinkenberg. This is a brass screw, representing the ‘twist’ needed in both research and art to come up with new ideas and symbolising the contrariness of research. Klinkenberg won the art competition at the first edition of the KNAW Early Career Award with Extended Jewellery.
The KNAW Early Career Awards will be presented during a ceremony at KNAW’s Trippenhuis on 15 February 2024.