More than 800 people signed up for the Dies Natalis. The attendees in the Aula were welcomed with images of fungal networks, schools of fish, swarms of birds, and ant colonies, set to Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps ('the Rite of Spring’). The central question during the Dies was whether such networks could serve as a metaphor for the networks within our university community.
Dies lecture by Toby Kiers
Toby Kiers, the recent Spinoza Prize winner, held this year’s Dies lecture. She spoke about underground fungal networks and her ‘Society for the Protection of the Underground Networks’. She is uniquely able to show the importance of these, at first glance hidden, fungal networks. She demonstrated how these networks organize themselves according to principles common in the economy: the fungi move to places where there is high demand for their nutrients and then engage in 'barter' with, for example, trees. For Toby, a network is more than the sum of its parts: each of the components of the networks she studies has certain qualities that can achieve their goals in collaboration with each other.
Honorary doctorate for Tima Bansal
Tima Bansal received an honorary doctorate from the School of Business and Economics during this Dies, presented by honorary promoters Hans Berends and Mirella Kleijnen, and dean Arjen van Witteloostuijn. Her story, like Toby's, stood out for its clear and powerful message: no jargon, but strong imagery. She painted the picture of herself in a hot air balloon with the CEOs of major companies to form sustainable networks between science and business as equal partners.
