Veni-grants for 21 UG researchers

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded a Veni grant of up to €320,000 each to 21 researchers of the University of Groningen and the UMCG. The Veni grants are designed for outstanding researchers who have recently gained a PhD.

NWO selects researchers based on the academic quality and the innovative character of the research proposal, the scientific and/or societal impact of the proposed project, and the quality of the researcher. The Veni grants, together with the Vidi and Vici grants, are part of the NWO Talent Programme. In total, the NWO has provided Veni funding to 204 researchers nationwide.

Exploring the genetic regulation of a virus infecting salt-loving archaea

Leon Bäcker, Faculty Science and Engineering

Viruses infect all organisms on Earth, including microorganisms. Archaea make up one of the three domains of life and often thrive in extreme conditions, such as high temperatures or salinities. However, relatively little is known about the life cycle of their viruses. By studying a model salt-loving archaeon and its virus with state-of-the-art genetic and molecular techniques, this project aims to unravel how archaeal viruses time and regulate their infection cycle. Understanding these mechanisms allows us to draw important conclusions about the evolution of viruses and to create tools that are urgently needed to realize the biotechnological potential of haloarchaea.

Why efficient networks look alike: universal laws of optimized systems

Serte Donderwinkel, Faculteit Science and Engineering

Many networks in nature and technology, from brain connections to transport systems and communication networks, must stay connected while using resources efficiently. Surprisingly, very different systems often end up looking alike after ‘zooming out’. The project aims to discover whether the large-scale shape of such efficient networks is universal: independent of the fine details of how the network is built, its geometry, or how strictly it is optimized. These results will explain why and how efficient global structures can emerge from local rules, with relevance for network science, algorithms, and self-organising systems such as adaptive materials and future computing hardware.

Echoes of Ancient Mergers: Tracing the Milky Way’s History with Variable Stars

Gustavo Medina Toledo, Faculty of Science and Engineering (soon to be appointed)

The outskirts of the Milky Way are dominated by mysterious ‘dark matter‘ and preserve clues that help astronomers explain how galaxies form. However, these regions have remained largely unexplored. This research will use variable stars — whose brightness changes make them exceptionally precise distance indicators — to change this. By exploiting data from the new generation of large astronomical surveys, this project will offer the most complete and precise picture of the outermost Milky Way to date, shedding new light on the Galaxy’s turbulent formation history, its place in the wider Universe, and the fundamental properties of dark matter.

Nature vs. Nurture: Are properties of a planet shaped by its birthplace or upbringing?

Pooneh Nazari, Faculty of Science and Engineering (soon to be appointed)

We have detected thousands of planets over the past decades. These planets show a vast diversity in their types and compositions. Are these variations a result of diverse birthplaces of those planets or their later upbringing? The researcher will tackle this question by studying the birthplace of planets and comparing their results to those in the literature for later stages of planet evolution and the fully-grown exoplanets. For this project, the researcher will use multiple modelling tools as well as data from state-of-the-art telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array.

Stopping Cancer Before It Starts: What Caloric Restriction Can Teach Us About Tumor Suppression

Jamil Nehme, Faculty of Medical Sciences/UMCG

Many cancers begin when DNA damage in healthy cells becomes a permanent genetic change. We still don’t fully understand why some damaged cells are repaired, eliminated, or permanently stopped, while others survive and can later form tumors. Caloric restriction (eating less) is one of the most consistent ways to reduce cancer formation in mice, but the underlying biology is unclear. In this project, scientists use caloric restriction as a research model in mice to uncover the body’s earliest anti-cancer defenses and identify pathways that could be targeted by future preventive drugs or other medical interventions.

Explainable AI for Fair Decisions: Spotting Bias Before It Hurts

Jakob Schoeffer, Faculty of Science and Engineering

AI systems are increasingly used to aid high-stakes decisions, such as in healthcare, hiring, and financial lending, but they can unintentionally reproduce social biases and disadvantage marginalized groups. This project develops novel AI tools that help humans understand how AI makes decisions, identify potential biases, and correct them. Through experiments with real users, theory-driven design, and innovative AI explanations, the research will produce methods and insights to make AI-assisted decisions fairer, more transparent, and trustworthy, while guiding policymakers and practitioners in preventing algorithmic harm.

How mutations alter the very beginning of Alzheimer‘s disease

Fabian Schuhmann, Faculty of Science and Engineering

Alzheimer’s disease is difficult to tackle because researchers still do not understand what sets it in motion at the very beginning. In this project, computer simulations will be used to study how small genetic changes in the so-called amyloid precursor protein behave inside the membranes of nerve cells. By comparing several of these mutations, their influence on the earliest molecular events that may contribute to the disease will be uncovered. These insights can help researchers focus on the stages where intervention might be most effective, long before symptoms appear.

From lab to life: uncovering the neural basis of anxiety

Suzanne van der Veldt, Faculty of Science and Engineering

Anxiety disorders affect millions of people and are nearly twice as common for women, yet scientists still do not know why. Much of what scientists know comes from studying mice in unnatural settings that may overlook important aspects of human anxiety disorders. This project records brain activity in male and female mice while they behave both in standard laboratory tests and in outdoor enclosures that better reflect natural conditions. By combining advanced tracking and brain-recording technology, this research aims to uncover neural processes that remain hidden in conventional laboratory testing, supporting both the development of better treatments and animal welfare.

Giving Parkinson’s a voice

Defne Abur, Faculty of Arts

Imagine that you know what you want to say, but the words don’t come out sounding right and people cannot understand you. This happens in Parkinson’s, the second most common brain disorder, which gets worse over time. Speech irregularities are an early Parkinson’s symptom, but it’s not clear why they develop and how they progress. This Veni will investigate the reasons for speech irregularities in Parkinson’s by measuring speech patterns and brain activity in the same people over time. The results will determine how brain changes in Parkinson’s influence speech so that speech symptoms can be effectively managed early on.

Restaging stories. A computational history of early modern Dutch drama in a European context (1500-1800)

Lucas van der Deijl, Faculty of Arts

Without a collective faith, language, or king, the early modern Dutch Republic relied on foreign stories to create shared identities. The theatre was the driving force behind this import of stories. This research project uses digitised archives of early modern theatres, a multilingual corpus of more than 2500 plays, and new computational methods for cross-lingual text analysis to reconstruct how foreign plays, characters, and stories changed early modern Dutch drama (1500-1800). These insights will challenge nationalist views on historical European cultures and rewrite Dutch literary histories from a transnational and transhistorical perspective.

Accurately capturing psychological processes over time and across people

Anja Ernst, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences

To effectively treat mental disorders like depression, clinicians study the changes that occur when a person transitions into or recovers from depression. So far, statistical models cannot capture how such changes over time differ across people. This research will develop a new statistical model that identifies groups of people who show similar changes over time. This will facilitate the development of treatments and interventions, making them more effective because they are better tailored to the individual patient.

How fast is the brain really?

Joost de Jong, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences

Brain activity can linger for up to half a second after seeing a flash. Nevertheless, our perception is not ‘smeared’ over time. How can we see so well despite ‘lingering’ neural activity? And if we could get rid of this activity, would humans perceive at even higher ‘temporal resolution’? Researchers will develop a computer model of how the brain manages to see at high temporal resolution despite lingering activity. This model also tells how to show images on computer screens so that lingering activity is removed, potentially allowing humans to perceive at even higher temporal resolution than they already do.

Sex & Drugs: Unraveling Chemsex among Men Who Have Sex with Men

Wouter Kiekens, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences

About 27% of Dutch men who have sex with men have used drugs during sex, also known as chemsex, and some of them face social and health problems because of it. Although we know a lot about the risks of chemsex, we still understand relatively little about why men who have sex with men engage in chemsex and when it leads to social or health problems. This research will uncover the motivations behind chemsex and identify when it becomes problematic. The findings will help healthcare providers, prevention programs, and harm reduction campaigns to better support this group.

Coordinating decisions under disagreement

Alex Lorson, Faculty of Arts

People often need to make important decisions together, even when they strongly disagree. From university budget cuts to international negotiations, talks can fail not only because people hold different views, but because the way they communicate makes it hard to combine those views. This project studies how people take each other’s perspective, how cognitive effort affects discussion, and how specific ways of phrasing arguments can help or hinder cooperation. Using controlled dialogue experiments and follow-up studies in face-to-face debates and online discussion platforms, the project identifies practical communication strategies that support constructive decision-making despite disagreement.

Medieval Metaphysics of Creation 1250-1400

Kamil Majcherek, Faculty of Philosophy

At first glance, creation seems like a purely theological topic. Yet, as this project will demonstrate, for medieval thinkers, it was a source of challenging philosophical problems, forcing them to establish the boundaries of basic concepts we use in philosophy as well as in everyday life, such as what is change: does change always presuppose a subject undergoing it, or can there be a change where something comes into being out of nothing? By looking at dozens of previously unstudied texts, this project will analyse the debate about creation and its implications for philosophy and everyday life.

Linguistic Time Travel with Greek New Testament Translations

Ezra la Roi, Faculty of Arts (soon to be appointed)

How can linguists use translations of the Greek New Testament to measure structural continuity and change across European languages and globally? Despite the exceptionally long history of Greek within Europe, little is known about its formative Early to Modern Greek period (16th century onward): corpora are still lacking, linguistic purism was pervasive, and similarities with Balkan and other European languages increased.Using a new parallel corpus of Greek New Testament translations with huge societal impact in their time, this project develops a ground-breaking method to measure structural continuity and change of European languages and languages across the world.

Beyond Titling: Women’s Land Rights, Economic Agency, and Institutional
Persistence in Rwanda

Kritika Saxena, Faculty of Economics and Business

Land reforms across Africa aim to grant women equal property rights, yet we do not know whether legal changes actually translate into lasting economic empowerment. Do customary norms ultimately limit women's control over land? This project looks at Rwanda, where women's reported land ownership declined dramatically despite formal legal equality. By analysing household surveys, administrative land records, and satellite data, it will reveal whether land titling genuinely empowers women or whether traditional practices reassert control. The findings will directly affect African nations and Dutch development policy, which supports land governance and women's empowerment programs across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Lab-on-a-Chip Platform for Single-Cell Mechanobiology

Vesna Bacheva, Faculty of Science and Engineering

Cells live in a world of forces. They are constantly pulled, stretched, and compressed, and these mechanical cues, alongside chemical ones, determine how cells grow and function. Yet such forces are difficult to recreate in the lab. I will develop a miniaturized on-chip platform that can deliver precise, real-time mechanical stimulation to cells, enabling researchers to study how cells sense and respond to these cues. This technology lays the groundwork for a new generation of organ-on-chip systems with high biological relevance for studying tissue function and improving drug screening.

Feather-Inspired Structures that Self-Repair Through Hierarchical Vibration and Directional Fastening Principles

Sebastian Hendrickx-Rodriguez, Faculty of Science and Engineering

Most engineered materials ultimately become waste in landfills or oceans. Extending their functional lifetime could reduce this burden, but current longevity strategies rely on chemical healing agents that hinder future reuse and recycling. In contrast, bird feathers repair damage because of their inherent structure and motion during flight. The researcher aims to design smart materials inspired by feathers that repair themselves naturally —without added chemicals. By combining experiments on feathers with computer modelling and 3D-printed prototypes, the researcher will identify design principles for sustainable, long-lasting engineered materials that self-repair because of their structure, rather than chemistry.

Healing outside the lines: sex and gender differences in alternative medicine use for PSS

Aranka Vivienne Ballering, Faculty of Medical Sciences/UMCG

Many people experience persistent somatic symptoms, which may lack a clear medical explanation. They may turn to alternative medicine, such as homeopathy or herbal medicine. This seems to be more common among women than men, but underlying reasons remain poorly understood. The researcher studies sex and gender differences in alternative medicine use and stopping evidence-based care. To this end, large Dutch datasets and patient interviews are analysed, to more precisely identify who uses alternative medicine, when, and why. This project aims to contribute to identifying how stopping with evidence-based care by people with persistent somatic symptoms can be prevented.

What’s holding you back? Improving goal-directed behavior in major depressive disorder

Laura Bustamante, Faculty of Medical Sciences/UMCG

One in four people will have an episode of major depressive disorder (MDD) in their lifetime, and one in three of these will experience multiple episodes. MDD symptoms such as difficulty thinking and feeling like they do not care can prevent accomplishing goals. These symptoms can persist even when MDD is treated and in remission, thus contributing to relapse. Multiple processes cause these challenges, but each process requires a different treatment. This project will tease apart these processes using brain scans and cognitive tests to explain difficulties with everyday goal-directed behavior, paving the way to personalized treatments to prevent relapse.