The call for the 2024 LNVH Advancing Women in Biology grants is open
About the initiative
The LNVH Advancing Women in Biology Grant is intended for travelling to and staying at a research site abroad in order to cooperate with a senior researcher. Researchers working in the field of biology focusing on the fundamental principles, processes and behaviour of living organisms, including research in the fields of self-organisation, collective behaviour, behavioural biology, endocrinology and behaviour, ecology, evolutionary biology, genetics, microbiology, botany, zoology, and related disciplines can apply.
The Dutch Network of Women Professors (LNVH) has founded the fund upon the request and kind donations of prof. dr. Charlotte Hemelrijk, emeritus professor of self-organization in social systems at the Institute of GELIFES of the University of Groningen, to stimulate the career of women PhD students working in biology to the higher echelons of academia. She will provide the funds for one annual grant. Additionally, the LNVH has decided to extend the program to include an additional grant, resulting in a total of two grants available each year. The maximum amount for a grant is 2500 euro, to be spent in the academic year 2024/2025.
Regulations and application form
Deadline for submitting applications is September 29, 2024. The outcome will be communicated to the applicants by the end of October 2024. For detailed rules and regulations, as well as the application form, please refer to the linked documents below.
Laureates 2023-2024
The LNVH board and bureau are pleased to announce the 2023-2024 Advancing Women in Biology Grant laureates. This year the following 2 laureates will receive the AWiB grant:
Iris van den Boomgaard is a PhD candidate at the Wageningen Human Nutrition and Health & Mathmatical and Statistical Group (Biometris). Her research focusses on providing a new perspective on the pathophysiology of kwashiorkor. Her group aims to achieve deep biological insights by utilizing advanced data analysis techniques, like multi-omics integration and causal learning. To achieve their goals, they collaborate with the Childhood Acute Illness and Nutrition (CHAIN) Network, an international network of scientists and clinicians. The CHAIN network gathered biological data from a cohort of approximately 3000 hospitalized children in limited resource settings across South Asia and Africa.
Iris will use the AWiB grant to fund a visit to one of CHAIN’s research facilities at the Kenya Medical Research Institute-Wellcome Trust Research Program (KWTRP). During her visit, she will have two main objectives. Firstly, she aims to gain a profound understanding of the clinical manifestations of the disease by observing how clinicians diagnose, treat, and collect biological data and samples. Secondly, she will organize a workshop on Bayesian statistics and causal network analysis to exchange our knowledge of data science with our hosts molecular biology expertise. Hence, this visit will solidify the collaboration between our research team at Wageningen University and KWTRP. This visit will bridge the gap between the research population, biological sample collection, the laboratory and the eventual data analysis. By doing so, they gain a deeper understanding of the pathophysiology of this enigmatic disease in vulnerable children. Learn more about Iris an her research in her introductory video.
Sacha Spelier is a postdoc at the Division of Pediatric Pulmonology at UMC Utrecht. She has mainly worked on characterizing novel treatments regimens for people with cystic fibrosis (CF) with nonsense mutations. Her group tries to create impact by performing preclinical studies in biologically complex and highly relevant experiments and cells, in particular by exploiting patient-derived cells grown as organoids. One of the projects she is most excited about, is the newly started collaboration with John Lueck, a principle investigator at the University of Rochester (USA). Sacha and John wrote a grant application for Emily’s Entourage, which was granted last year.
Sacha is now setting up a new knowledge institute to improve translation of preclinical research into a clinical setting. Before starting with these next steps, supposedly in summer 2024, she is highly motivated to immerse herself for a short period in a different research setting that would allow her to learn many new techniques and technique-overarching research-related lessons. As the lab of Lueck is highly experienced in CF-related fields and techniques that Sacha is not yet familiar with, the AWiB grant offers a great opportunity to learn and gain new insights. Sacha envisions two specific lab-projects that she will pursue together with a postdoc of Lueck’s lab, allowing a high learning curve in a relative short time-period (2 months). Learn more about Sacha's research in her introductory video.
Sacha Spelier (above) and Iris van den Boomgaard with Prof. dr. Charlotte Hemelrijk during the AWiB award ceremony at the LNVH Spring Symposium 2024
On July 1, 2023, the call for the first LNVH Advancing Women in Biology grants will open! The LNVH is delighted to announce this new travel and research grant for women PhD candidates working in the field of Biology at a research institution in the Netherlands. Candidates can use the grant, which amounts to a maximum of €2500, to cover the expenses of traveling to and staying at a scientific institution abroad to work with a senior scientist or conducting field- or archive research related to a topic within the field of Biology. Here, biology can be understood in the broadest sense of the word.
Regulations and application form
Applications will be accepted until September 29, 2023. The outcome will be communicated to the applicants by the end of October 2023. For detailed rules and regulations, as well as the application form, please refer to the linked PDF documents below.