The recipients are researchers from the fields of Social Sciences and Humanities (SGW), Applied and Technical Sciences (TTW), Exact and Natural Sciences (ENW), and Health Research and Healthcare Innovation (ZonMw).
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is proud to congratulate the following awardees, listed in alphabetical order:
Neuroscientist Sterre de Boer receives the Veni grant for her research A picky disease: why does drontemporal dementia only targets the front of the brain?
Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is a leading cause of dementia in younger people and causes major changes in personality, behaviour, and language. There are no treatments that can stop or slow the disease. A striking feature of FTD is that it often affects only one side of the brain and mainly damages the front parts of the brain. Understanding why this happens is essential for developing effective treatments. Therefore, POLAR-FTD aims to uncover the reasons behind this selective brain damage.
Assistant Professor of Management and Organization Ira Chatterjee has been awarded the Veni grant for her research Governing Together for Social Change: How Cross-Sector Partnerships Address Societal Challenges.
Chatterjee explores how governments, businesses, and community organisations can work together to address major societal challenges such as inequality, climate change, and access to quality education. Many of these issues cannot be solved by government policy alone and require collaboration across sectors. Using education partnerships as real-world examples, Chatterjee examines how such collaborations can be inclusive, effective, and sustainable. She identifies what helps partnerships succeed and how these lessons can be reused in other settings. Chatterjee will develop practical tools to support policymakers and practitioners in building partnerships that create lasting social impact.
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Neuroscientist Emma Coomans has been awarded the Veni grant for her research Alzheimer’s disease: how can we delay the onset and progression of the disease?
Why do some individuals develop Alzheimer’s disease pathology already at a young age, while others don’t develop Alzheimer’s disease pathology until very extreme ages, or never at all? Coomans investigates different factors that may influence the age at which Alzheimer’s disease pathology manifests. The findings will help advance strategies aimed at preventing or delaying the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
Organizational scientist Zakia Essanhaji has been awarded the Veni grant for her research Doing social safety: differential definitions, enactments and contestations in Dutch academia.
Universities in the Netherlands are increasingly concerned with social safety as a response to harassment, bullying, and power abuse. Yet the term is often vague, and its meaning varies across policies and teaching practices. Essanhaji explores how social safety circulates in university life, shaping how staff and students expe-rience un/safety and in/equality. Using interviews, observation, and document analysis at multiple universities, she traces how social safety is applied, stretched, or contested. The findings provide practical insights for diversity practitioners, university leaders, educators, and policymakers on improving campus well-being and addressing structural inequalities in higher education.
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Assistant Professor of Digital Strategy and Innovation Lukas Andreas Falcke has been awarded the Veni grant for his research From Grids to Ecosystems: Orchestrating Innovation to Relieve Grid Congestion.
Electricity grids are under pressure as renewable energy, electrification, and data centers grow faster than grid capacity. Building new infrastructure takes years, so the energy sector need smarter ways of using existing networks. Falcke studies how different organizations - grid operators, technology providers, markets, and users- work together like an “innovation ecosystem” to test and adopt new solutions such as energy storage and flexible electricity demand. By following real pilot projects in the Netherlands and across Europe, he explains how coordinated actions succeed or fail, offering lessons to speed up practical solutions for a reliable and cleaner energy system.
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Neuroscientist Tom Fuchs receives the Veni grant for his research Under the surface: spotting hidden cognitive decline in multiple sclerosis.
People with multiple sclerosis (MS) often experience slow cognitive decline, even when scans look stable and no relapses occur. This hidden decline can affect work, independence, and daily life, but it is rarely detected early. Fuchs will follow people with MS at home using short monthly digital thinking tests, combined with brain scans and blood tests. By linking these results to large international patient datasets, he aims to recognize cognitive decline earlier and better predict who is at risk..
Pharmaceutical scientist Ariadni Geballa Koukoula is receiving the Veni grant for her research project T3: Track, Trap, and Tag Toxic Proteins for Early Parkinson's Detection.
Imagine watching a loved one struggle with trembling hands; this is the reality for millions of people caring for someone with Parkinson’s disease. The disease occurs when proteins in the brain misfold and clump together, killing nerve cells. By the time symptoms appear, irreversible damage has already occurred. Geballa Koukoula develops a three-tiered approach to detect toxic protein clumps earlier than currently possible. The first step tracks how proteins clump in real-time, the second flags suspicious clusters, and the third confirms their identity. Detecting these clumps in blood before symptoms appear will enable earlier diagnosis, and slow disease progression.
Neurobiologist Jara Tabitha Hees is receiving the Veni grant for her research How brain cells switch on local protein production and why it matters in ALS.
Our brain cells, called neurons, have long extensions that require local protein production to function and survive. This process is disrupted in diseases like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). In this project, Hees will investigate how neurons control when and where proteins are made. The focus is on tiny contact points between two key structures inside the cell: the endoplasmic reticulum, which helps produce proteins, and the cytoskeleton, the cell’s transport network. Using advanced imaging and genetic tools, Hees will uncover how these contact sites act as control hubs and what goes wrong in ALS.
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Sociologist Laura Keesman has been awarded the Veni grant for her research Contested Arrests: A Dual-Perspective Integrative Video Study of Violent Police-Civilian Interactions.
Police-civilian encounters are key moments where state authority is enacted and contested. When they escalate into violence, they harm individuals, erode public trust, and undermine legitimacy. However, we know little about how violence develops and how situations (de)escalate because real-life analyses from both perspectives are largely missing. Keesman pioneers dual-perspective video-elicitation interviews with police and civilians, combined with ethnomethodological/conversation analysis, to examine how participants interpret each other's actions. By including the long-absent civilian perspective and constructing an integrative dataset, she identifies mechanisms driving (de)escalation, advancing understanding of police–civilian interactions and informing policy and training aimed at mitigating violence.
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Neuroscientist Janina Kupke receives the Veni grant for her research How the brain stores memories despite constant protein turnover.
Memories are stored in specific brain cells that strengthen their connections during learning. But while these connections need to remain stable for memories to last, the molecules that build them are constantly replaced. Kupke investigates how the brain nevertheless keeps memories intact over time. She studies whether epigenetic mechanisms, which regulate gene activity, help stabilize memory-related connections in the brain. Her work may improve our understanding of memory-related disorders such as PTSD and Alzheimer’s disease.
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AI scientist Enrico Liscio receives the Veni grant for his research AI that adapts to what matters to you.
AI systems such as chatbots are increasingly used to support people in sensitive areas like public services and healthcare. For these systems to be trustworthy, they must not only avoid harmful behavior, but also respond in ways that reflect human values such as fairness and autonomy. Liscio studies how AI systems can adapt to different users and situations by learning about people’s values during conversation and adjusting their responses accordingly. By combining technical research with user experiments, he aims to develop AI systems that behave responsibly, flexibly, and in line with societal expectations.
Heritage studies scholar and architect Marilena Mela is receiving the Veni grant for her research project Unearth, Re-earth: Heritage activism and local knowledge in extraction landscapes under transition.
Studying how people relate to their environments through history, culture, and place can provide essential knowledge amidst the climate crisis. Mela will investigate how heritage - the collective memories, interpretations, and knowledge systems of the past- is mobilised to resist environmental damage and imagine more sustainable futures. She will examine three landscapes shaped by mining and energy extraction in the Netherlands, Greece, and Chile. These sites of industrial histories and inherited knowledge now become linked to the energy transition through new plans and infrastructures. By combining fieldwork, archival research, and collaboration with local partners, Mela will research how protest movements and long-lived landscape knowledge inform environmental stewardship today.
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Elinor Meredith, researcher in the field of volcanic risks, has been awarded the Veni grant for her research Impact-first multi-hazard volcanic scenarios for Europe.
Volcanic eruptions cause impacts far beyond the volcano. Ash from Iceland’s 2010 eruption grounded European flights, while the 2021 La Palma eruption caused local damage and spread gases across Europe. Impacts are not determined by the eruption alone, but by the location and vulnerability of people and infrastructure, and interactions between volcanic and other hazards (e.g., extreme rainfall). Europe’s population growth increases the potential for large-scale impact. The project IMPACT-VOLC of Meredith makes a fundamental shift from hazard-led “where might hazards go?” to impact-based assessment “under what conditions do impacts become disruptive?”, combining interacting hazards with future societal changes to prepare for European eruptions.
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Cultural anthropologist and religious scientist Lieke Schrijvers has been awarded the Veni grant for her research Shattered and Whole. Jewish Young Adults Searching for Joy in a Time of Crisis.
Since October 2023, Jewish life in the Netherlands has become more publicly visible amid growing polarisation. While fear and political tension shape daily experience, communities continue to express creativity, connection, and joy-dimensions often overlooked when focus rests mainly on antisemitism and trauma. Schrijvers offers a first ethnographic study of how Jewish young adults cultivate community in changing times. Through participant observation and interviews across institutional and informal settings, it examines how emotions, gender, and belonging intersect. She argues that joy is not a denial of crisis but an ethical and political practice shaping future-oriented Jewish life.
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Assistant Professor of Public Administration Kayla Schwoerer receives the Veni grant for her research The Visibility Dilemma: Investigating the Intermediating Role of Platform Algorithms in Government Communication.
Governments now rely on social media platforms to share public information. However, these platforms are not neutral. By filtering and prioritizing content, proprietary algorithms optimized for attention and engagement shape which government messages become visible, to whom, and when. Thus, governments face incentives to align communication with what algorithms privilege rather than bureaucratic norms. Schwoerer examines the “visibility dilemma” using a comparative mixed methods design across five countries to understand how governments adapt their communication practices to algorithmic pressures and how citizens evaluate these practices, including whether institutional contexts provide varying degrees of friction from such pressures.
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Assistant Professor of Urban Economics Mathieu Steijn receives the Veni grant for his research The role of social infrastructure in social mobility.
Inequality of opportunity is growing. Social connections are an important factor in improving the chances of upward social mobility of children from low-income households. To influence this, most research and policy focusses on the characteristics of demographic groups living together in neighbourhoods. However, social relations are about coming together rather than living together. Therefore, social infrastructure, places that foster social interaction, like sport clubs, are an interesting object of research. Steijn will map social infrastructure and its users to understand the social mobility of previous generations to come up with actionable insights to improve that of future generations.
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Biological psychologist Lianne de Vries receives the Veni grant for her research From Stress to Strength: the Origins and Consequences of Adolescent Resilience.
Everyone experiences stress, but not everyone always responds the same or recovers equally well. De Vries studies resilience, how individuals adapt to stressful experiences, focusing on adolescence, when stress increases and mental health problems first emerge. By combining long-term and daily-life data, she will examine how childhood factors shape adolescent resilience, and how resilience develops across adolescence and adulthood. De Vries will also identify which personal, social, lifestyle, and environmental factors, such as optimism, support from others, and sleep, help protect mental health over time. The findings can improve early detection and prevention to support lifelong mental health.
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Social psychologist Giulia Zoppolat is receiving the Veni grant for her research PARADOX: Parental Ambivalence and its Relational And Developmental Outcomes and eXperiences.
Parenthood can be a paradox: love and joy often mix with frustration and disappointment. How often do parents feel these conflicting emotions, and how do such emotions shape family life? Zoppolat explores when and why parents feel conflicted, how this affects family wellbeing, and what may help parents manage the emotional complexity of parenthood.
The grant is designed to encourage adventurous, talented, and groundbreaking researchers to further develop their own research ideas over the next three years. Each researcher receives up to 320,000 euros. The Veni is a personal research grant aimed at researchers who have recently earned their PhDs. This funding instrument allows researchers to pursue research of their own choosing. Consequently, the projects that receive funding focus on a wide variety of topics.
Talent ProgramThe goal of the NWO Talent Program is to create creative space for adventurous, talented, and groundbreaking researchers, allowing them to conduct research of their own choosing, develop a line of inquiry, and further develop their talent. The Veni target group consists of researchers in the transition phase toward independence, for whom the Veni grant can contribute to their professional development in this area. Researchers eligible for a Veni grant possess academic qualities that clearly exceed the norm. The Veni grant is intended to fund scientifically innovative research and thereby give these researchers the opportunity to develop as independent researchers.
The 205 grants from the 2025 Veni round are distributed as follows: 59 awards in Exact and Natural Sciences (ENW), 81 in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SGW), 30 in Applied and Technical Sciences (TTW), and 35 grants at ZonMw.
Read more on the NWO website.