Else Starkenburg receives Aspasia grant

The Dutch Research Council (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, NWO) has awarded an Aspasia grant of EUR 40,000 to Prof. Else Starkenburg of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute. Starkenburg will use this funding in addition to her Vidi grant to conduct research into the baby years of our own galaxy: the Milky Way. With the Aspasia grant, the NWO aims to promote the advancement of female university lecturers to higher university positions.

Together with her international team, Starkenburg is trying to unravel how the Milky Way was formed, by studying the oldest generations of stars in detail. In the coming years she hopes to use for this, among other things, new data from the novel WEAVE instrument – developed partly in the Netherlands – on one of the telescopes on the island of La Palma in Spain. With the Aspasia grant, Starkenburg can bring international scientists with whom her group works closely to Groningen and start new projects. At the same time, she and her group can visit colleagues in other countries and together make better observations of interesting stars that they think can provide us with new information about the early universe.

Aspasia

The Aspasia grant is intended to ensure that more female university lecturers move on to higher university positions. The programme provides a grant to universities, intended for the appointment of female candidates to associate professorships and to full professorships.