Winners of the Sustainable Society PhD Grants 2021

To stimulate young researchers to work on societal challenges, Sustainable Society every years provides PhD candidates with the opportunity to hand in their research proposal for a grant of € 2500,-.

The jury granted the proposals, which have a close connection to the Sustainable Society theme, which showed the most explicit contribution towards societal challenges and where the grant could make the biggest difference for the project or the applicant. The PhD candidates are doing a doctoral research (including scholarship candidates at the University of Groningen.

Out of 36 applications, the jury granted the following eight winners. Here they tell you how they will use their grant.

Abe Hendriks
The aim of our activity is to stimulate the public debate in Fryslân about the transition to a circular economy. The grant will be spend on the organization of a culinary activity with chef cooks and restaurant holders in Fryslân to set up an event where this Circular Food Menu will be served to regional stakeholders, including officials from the Province of Fryslân and the Municipality of Leeuwarden.

Anna-Rosja Haveman
The grant will be spent on the 10-day summer school of The Alps Art Academy, that takes place in congruence with the exhibition Art Safiental. The remaining sum will be directed towards the exhibition about my PhD research.

Jean-Yves Duriaux
We will expand the reach of our surveys on landscape approaches that achieve multiple objectives for nature and people with Dutch and German farmers. And we will include a set of workshops forresult presentation to stakeholders (farmers, conservationist, scientist, gov.officials) to receive feedback and co-create the key policy advice.

Jingyu Li
The goal is to study the landscape value and land use preference of local people living in Wulingyuan. The grant will be spent to conduct a map-based survey consists of around 1000 questionnaires.

Kanella Maria Marosi
This grant will be spent for a research stay in Montreal, Canada for the purpose of professional development with a group that specializes on queer identities and science. And organizing a (virtual if needed) open to the public science café in Groningen.

Manuela Fritz
My research investigates the health consequences of climate change for individuals with chronic, non-communicable diseases (NCDs), focusing on low- and middle-income countries. It will be spent on field research in West Java, Indonesia, to collect qualitative data nfor the study, which is hitherto solely based on quantitative data

Selen Eren
The loss of trust in science is an urgent societal challenge that compromises the legitimacy of political actions informed by scientific knowledge. The grant will help me partially fund a threemonth fellowship in the Science, Technology and Society Program at Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University. The research I want to conduct with this grant contributes to solutions for this challenge, by investigating how scientific credibility is established for different stakeholders of knowledge production processes. My case study focuses on ecologists, led by Theunis Piersma, who collaborate with farmers to produce ‘credible’ scientific knowledge addressing the disappearance of black-tailed godwits and Dutch meadows.

Tjeerd Rudmer de Vries
I intend on going on a research visit at the Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen (KU) in Denmark, led by Prof.Naja Hulvej Rod. Prof. Hulvej Rod has recently set up a unique registry-based dataset with information on the occurrence of childhood adversity on approximately 1.5 million Danish children (DANLIFE). The goal of my research visit is to use the richness of the DANLIFE data for my final PhD paper.