Veni grants for 18 Leiden researchers
Eighteen researchers from Leiden University have been awarded a Veni grant by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). This grant gives promising young researchers the opportunity to develop their ideas for a period of three years.
Read more about the projects for which the researchers have received a grant:
Paw support: animal-shaped social robots in elder care in the Netherlands
Tanja Ahlin (Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology)
Worldwide, ageing populations are placing pressure on healthcare systems, already strained due to limited financial and human resources. This study explores the role of animal-shaped social robots in Dutch elder care to support sustainable long-term care. Using ethnographic methods, it examines how these robots participate in daily care practices, what shapes people’s resistance to their adoption and strategies to overcome this, including nontechnological resistance. Building on these insights, the project will provide guidelines to support personalised long-term care policy in the Netherlands and elsewhere.
Spousal survival advantage by marrying into longevity enriched families
Niels van den Berg (LUMC)
In this project, Van den Berg will investigate how partnership in healthy ageing long-lived families affects (inter)generational health and survival. Partners may exhibit similarities in health through various mechanisms, such as exchanging resources and behaviour or through a like-seeking-like principle. However, these mechanisms remain speculative and have not been fully tested. By jointly studying family networks, socioeconomic, genomic and behavioural data in cohort studies and nationwide registers, I can distinguish the different mechanisms, study lifecourses and intergenerational effects, and distinguish cause and effect. This project improves the mechanistic understanding of how resources and behaviour are exchanged between partners and influence multigenerational health outcomes.
Fuel up! How cold gas fuels distant galaxies
Leindert Boogaard (Leiden Observatory)
Cold gas is the fuel for star formation. Galaxies in the early universe contained much more cold gas than galaxies do today. What were the conditions for star formation in the early universe? And how do these conditions impact the growth of galaxies from the Big Bang to the present? Boogaard combines sensitive telescopes on Earth and in space with advanced models to map the conditions for star formation in the cold gas. This provides important insight into the cosmic cycle of matter in galaxies, from the cosmic web down to a star-forming cloud.
Listener profiles: why and how we differ in the perception of intonation in speech
Stan van der Burght (Leiden University Centre for Linguistics)
In everyday communication, the words we say matter, but also how we say them. The intonation in speech can create distinct differences in meaning (as in: ‘You’re leaving!’ or: ‘You’re leaving?’). Intonation is a key characteristic of language, but how do listeners actually process it? The aim of this study is to investigate how people process intonation. A large group of listeners will take part in both new and existing tests of intonation, language, memory, and musicality. The results will show in what ways the skill of processing intonation is unique, and how strongly it relies on other skills.
Portable real-time audio large language model system for speech disorder therapy
Qinyu Chen (Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science)
Speech disorders impact tens of millions of people worldwide, hindering communication and significantly impacting daily lives. This project aims to develop a portable, real-time intelligent system tailored for speech disorder therapy. Combining advanced large language model technology with specific energy-efficient hardware design, the system provides real-time feedback and personalised guidance while maintaining low power consumption. Running entirely on mobile devices, the portable system ensures user privacy and therapy accessibility anytime, anywhere. This innovation makes speech therapy more accessible and effective, reduces clinical burdens, and helps individuals with speech disorders regain confidence and independence in communication.
Vaccine variability: are stromal cells innocent bystanders or active players?
Mariateresa Coppola (LUMC)
Vaccines train our immune cells to defend us against infections. Yet, immune cells in some individuals respond poorly to vaccines, which results in less protection against infections. What causes this variability? This study hypothesizes a critical role for stromal cells, understudied non-immune cells that support and interact with immune cells. By investigating how stromal cells differ in individuals with strong or weak vaccine responses, this project aims to discover ways to ‘coach’ these cells to enhance immune responses. This knowledge will help develop vaccines that are effective for everyone.
Neurosurgery for traumatic brain injury: innovation by personalisation
Thomas van Essen (LUMC)
Neurosurgical interventions in traumatic brain injury are often necessary, but efficacy varies by patient and surgery carries risk. I will investigate which patients with brain bleeds benefit from surgery and which do not. In addition, I will examine which patients profit from a pressure monitor placed in the brain. Van Essen will combine studies from Europe, China, India, America, and England and create innovative methods to tailor these interventions to individual patients. The findings will help clinicians worldwide provide precise, effective care for each individual with this devastating condition.
Understanding inflammation in cerebral amyloid angiopathy
Ellis van Etten (LUMC)
Cerebral Amyloid Angiopathy (CAA) is a disease where toxic proteins build up in the brain's blood vessels, leading to strokes and dementia. In some cases, severe inflammation, called CAA-related inflammation (CAA-ri), causes additional damage like brain swelling and vessel rupture. Van Etten will study how inflammation worsens vascular damage in CAA by analysing patient data, performing advanced brain scans to track inflammation and blood vessel health and evaluating treatments that reduce inflammation. Insights from this study could lead to better care for elderly patients at risk of stroke and dementia."
Taking a risk on disasters: speculative humanitarianism amidst a changing climate in Malawi
Tanja Hendriks (African Studies Centre Leiden)
Based on weather forecasts and climate models, humanitarian organisations increasingly fund and implement interventions that attempt to protect people from potential future disasters. Framed as a more sustainable, pro-active way to protect lives and livelihoods amidst climate change, this signifies an important political and moral shift in humanitarian governance. To understand the consequences of this shift, this research develops the concept of speculative humanitarianism to examine how government officials and humanitarian organisations anticipate and speculate on future disasters in the present. Ethnographic fieldwork takes place in Malawi, an aid-dependent and disaster-prone African country, where dystopian climate scenarios are unfolding.
Unlocking the Universe
Guadalupe Cañas Herrera (Leiden Observatory)
Approximately 95% of the Universe consists of dark matter and dark energy, yet their true nature remains a mystery. To understand them, scientists rely on a cosmological model that explains much of the Universe’s behaviour, though many fundamental questions remain unanswered. The groundbreaking ESA Euclid mission will help answer these questions by observing billions of galaxies to create a 3D map of the Universe. This project will play a key role in Euclid’s effort to unravel the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy by developing new statistical approaches to extract groundbreaking insights into the dark Universe.
High expectations, low variance: reliable statistical learning algorithms through interactive decision making
Dirk van der Hoeven (Mathematical Institute)
Statistical learning is everywhere: from movie recommendations to text analysis. Despite high expectations surrounding statistical learning, it often provides unreliable performance in applications. Fraudsters try to mislead algorithms and medicine is data-scarce, which leads to high variance. To tackle the challenges in statistical learning, Van der Hoeven will use tools from interactive decision-making. Contrary to statistical learning, interactive decision making is a dynamic setting that does not rely on restrictive assumptions for strong guarantees. Van der Hoeven aims to provide solid mathematical foundations to understand underlying mechanisms and guarantee optimal performance at deployment. Ultimately satisfying the high expectations with low variance.
Managing compliance: What role do interest groups play?
Rik Joosen (Institute of Public Administration)
Interest groups play a key role in how companies relate to laws and regulations, for instance by giving them advice or even by stimulating a certain approach to compliance. Choosing the right strategy requires interest groups to balance the support from the companies they represent with support from citizens and policymakers who want them to commit to societal goals. This project assesses how interest groups navigate this balancing act. The results show in what way interest groups try to affect how their members relate to laws and regulations and under what conditions interest groups pursue different strategies with that aim.
Data-driven personalised medicine
Maaike van der Lee (LUMC)
Each patient responds differently to drugs. This variability is caused by genetics, the combination of drug use, age, gender and other factors. Currently, all of these factors are taken into account separately when developing a patient's medication regimen. In this project, computational approaches will be used to integrate all these factors into one model that can predict how a patient will respond to certain drugs. The ultimate goal is to understand exactly what each factor contributes to drug response and predict the chance of a patient experiencing adverse drug events.
Indonesian Islamic manuscripts in the digital age
Verena Meyer (Institute for Area Studies)
This project combines ethnography and textual analysis to explore how digitisation transforms the cultural and political significance of Islamic manuscripts in Indonesia and the Netherlands. In today’s postcolonial context, Islamic manuscripts are variably understood as powerful ritual articles, artefacts symbolising heritage and tradition, and objects of scholarly inquiry. By examining how digitisation interacts with these views, the project will inform debates on the legacy of sacred texts and the ethics and practices of their digitisation in postcolonial and crosscultural contexts.
A one stop shop MRI scan
Martijn Nagtegaal (LUMC)
MRI provides a lot of information, but is often only available after referral by a medical specialist. MRI is relatively inaccessible due to high costs, complexity and long scan times. By performing MRI with a weaker magnet, placing an MRI in a local healthcare clinic becomes more feasible. Nagtegaal will develop a new MRI approach for this 0.6T MRI system, which acquires quantitative maps of all relevant tissue properties and develops methods to automatically detect possible pathology. More accessible MRI close to the GP will reduce the time until a patient is diagnosed and reduce costs for the healthcare system.
Plagues, pests and plantations
Larissa Schulte Nordholt (Institute for History)
This research investigates how animal ‘pests’ shaped agricultural science in colonial plantations, focusing on the Dutch East Indies and Suriname. It explores ‘knowledge creolization’, the blending of European and Indigenous practices, to manage ‘pests’ like ants and rats. The project examines how colonisers adapted local pest control methods, integrating them into agricultural science, despite often dismissing them. Using colonial sources, oral histories, and life sciences research, it traces pest management knowledge from colonial plantations to modern techniques like Integrated Pest Management. By studying human-animal-plant interactions, the research offers fresh insights into colonial science, global agricultural practices, and environmental knowledge systems.
(Un)sustainable expertise: Navigating environmental policy and public trust in the Dutch Republic (1600-1800)
Anna-Luna Post (Institute for History)
Politicians often rely on the advice of experts to bolster and legitimise their decision-making. This project adopts a historical perspective to examine how, why, and when local, regional and national authorities in the Dutch Republic relied on expert advice, when they ignored it, and to which tensions this led. In doing so, it offers valuable insight to a fundamental question still relevant to this day: how can we sustainably build relationships of trust between experts, political authorities, and the communities they serve?
Controlling protein cross-talk of cannabinoid receptors with light
Jana Volaric (Leiden Institute of Chemistry)
Most proteins in our body are modified with small molecules which orchestrate where they go, what they do and how they do it. These modifications are very diverse in nature and often transient, making it difficult to investigate their molecular role in biological processes. Volaric will use light-responsive molecules directly introduced into cannabinoid receptors, important proteins which regulate several biological processes in our brain and immune system, to study their dynamics. This project will shine light on questions regarding how cannabinoid receptors function and open possibilities to improved drug design and development.