The laureates are, in alphabetical order:
Psychologist Elsje van Bergen receives a Vidi for her research Growing up among bright books and generous genes.
Does your child read well because you have read to them, or because you have passed on beneficial genes? And do your genes influence how much you read to your child? Van Bergen will study in parents and children how genes and the home environment influence educational achievement. To discover which factors influence how children learn and progress, she will offer families access to online literacy and math games designed to boost learning.
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Political scientist Naná de Graaff receives a Vidi for her research Globalization Unravelling? The Geopolitics of Europe-China Tech Decoupling.
The banning of Huawei from 5G networks in Europe has made technological decoupling from China subject to a heated public and political debate. Empirical studies on technological decoupling in Europe are emerging, but so far primarily from policy-oriented perspectives. Scientific knowledge is lagging behind this rapidly evolving development. The research of De Graaff builds on a few pioneering academic studies contributing to an emerging body of knowledge on Europe-China technological decoupling and will offer an original and novel approach with a focus on the political and geopolitical drivers of technological decoupling building on the notion of techno-nationalism.
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Environmental economist Toon Haer receives a Vidi for his research Towards a fair distribution of coastal climate risk.
Adaptation to climate change is often geared towards large-scale investments to protect areas with high economic value. This largely neglects vulnerable and marginalized groups in coastal areas who are dependent upon natural resources and who have few resources to cope and recover from natural hazards. Haer investigates how different adaptation measures reduce or increase the equal distribution of risk. Moreover, he investigates how different adaptation strategies by governments and households can lead to reduced inequality, now and in the future.
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Labor economist Paul Muller receives a Vidi for his research Alleviating scarcity on the labour market.
Labour market scarcity in the Netherlands has been unprecedented in the past year. Muller studies various causes and approaches to alleviate scarcity through addressing occupational mismatch and structural lack of labour supply. He considers policies targeted at four populations that make up potential labour supply: unemployed job seekers, employees, long-term sick and disabled workers, and migrants.
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Political economist Marc van de Wardt receives a Vidi for his research Survivor. Uncovering the selection process of political elites in Europe.
Since Aristotle’s days, politicians’ moral qualities (virtu) have caught much attention. Simultaneously, we know little about politicians’ virtue-related personality traits. Marc van de Wardt applies personality models from psychology, providing unparalleled insight into virtue-related traits. He unpacks the impact of these traits at several essential stages of the selection process politicians undergo: from the nascent ambition of citizens, to the progressive ambition of local politicians to the political survival of national MPs. At each step, he shows how personality traits affect political ambition and the fulfilment of this ambition. Also he uncovers the personality traits desired by voters and party selectorates
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Sarah Derks of Amsterdam UMC, location VUmc receives a Vidi for her research Targeting gastro-esophageal cancer cells to liberate immunity.
Gastroesophageal cancers behave as master repressors of the immune systems; an important reason for unresponsiveness to immunotherapy and chemoradiotherapy. Derks aims to identify the mechanisms cancers use to inactive approaching immune cells. Through these studies, she will test new immune activating strategies to improve outcome in this disease.
Joreintje Mackenbach of Amsterdam UMC, location VUmc receives a Vidi for her research Prevention of obesity: from failure to success,
The current approach to obesity prevention is failing. One important but underexposed reason is that public health interventions aimed at reducing the consumption of unhealthy foods are diametrically opposed to commercial strategies aimed at maximizing the sales and consumption of unhealthy foods, and policy makers are reluctant to intervene. Mackenbach will unravel the ways in which commercial companies influence whether or not effective obesity prevention policies such as a sugar tax are adopted, and identify the conditions under which governments opt for stricter obesity prevention policies.
Physicist Peter Kraus receives a Vidi for his research Super-resolution for dancing electrons.
The collective dance of electrons in materials causes otherwise absent exotic properties. Such properties include phase transitions from insulators to metals that are triggered by heat, pressure, or light. Understanding and technologically harnessing these properties is difficult, because they emerge on time scales of femtoseconds and length sales of nanometers. In HIMALAYA, I will climb new levels of super-resolution microscopy, that is microscopy with nanometer resolution beyond what usual microscopes can resolve. With this new technique, I will resolve the correlated dance of electrons in time and space to unravel what drives these exotic material transformations.
NWO Talent Programme
Vidi is aimed at experienced researchers who have already conducted successful research for several years after their PhD. They receive 800,000 euros. Vidi, together with the Veni and Vici grants, is part of the NWO Talent Programme. The NWO Talent Program gives researchers the freedom to conduct their own research based on creativity and passion. The NWO Talent Program stimulates innovation and curiosity. Free research contributes to and prepares us for the society of tomorrow. NWO selects researchers based on the scientific quality and innovative character of the research proposal, the scientific and/or social impact of the proposed project and the quality of the researcher.
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