Vici grant for Tjisse van der Heide

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded a Vici grant worth €1.5 million to professor of Coastal Ecology Tjisse van der Heide for his research on coastal ecosystem restoration at NIOZ. This grant will enable him to develop an innovative line of research and set up his own research group for five years.

Vici is one of the largest scientific grants for individuals in the Netherlands and targets advanced researchers. The funding instrument enables researchers to pursue research of their own choice. This gives innovative research a boost and encourages the promotion of talent at scientific research institutes.

Tjisse van der Heide

Prof. Van der Heide (Faculty of Science and Engineering, Groningen institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences), Professor of Coastal Ecology, was awarded a Vici grant. This research, conducted at NIOZ, looks at the restoration of coastal ecosystems by temporarily mimicking the habitat-forming species. Coastal ecosystems shaped by habitat-forming species provide vital ecosystem services but are declining worldwide. Their restoration is failure-prone because ecosystem stability hinges on self-facilitation generated by ‘emergent traits’. Such traits emerge when habitat formers aggregate, causing self-facilitation to only work beyond certain minimum patch size and density thresholds. With this grant, a new framework that combines methods from ecology, industrial design, and engineering to design tailormade mimics will be tested.