Distinguished Women Scientists Fund

The call for the 2024-2025 Distinguished Women Scientists Fund is open

In 2012 the Dutch Network of Women Professors created the Distinguished Women Scientists Fund, a travel grant (max. 1500 euro) for female postdocs - up to 3 years after their PhD and from all disciplines, working in the Netherlands - who wish to travel abroad as part of their research projects.

The LNVH created the travel grant at the request of prof. dr. Anne Cutler, former director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and emeritus professor of Comparative Language Psychology at Radboud University Nijmegen. On the occasion of her retirement, she asked her colleagues and friends to forgo parting gifts and instead donate to the LNVH. 

This year women scientists can once again benefit from this travel grant. Currently 6 applications are rewarded per call. 

 

Regulations and application form

Deadline for submitting applications is December 15, 2024. The outcome will be communicated to the applicants in February 2025. For detailed rules and regulations, as well as the application form, please refer to the linked documents below.

In case of questions, please contact the LNVH bureau via 030 600 1361 | info@lnvh.nl.

Rules and conditions
Application form

 

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DWSF Laureates 2023-2024

The LNVH board and bureau are pleased to announce the 2023-2024 Distinguished Women Scientists Fund laureates. This year the following 7 laureates will receive the DWSF travel grant: 

Rocio Arreguín Campos is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Maastricht University. During her doctorate, she worked with detection technologies for the accurate and on-site sensing of bacteria and its application in food safety. She is now working on a new research line that will focus on the development of synthetic receptors for the detection of the parasite that causes malaria. With the DWSF travel grant she will visit the Parasitology department at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil. This Brazilian-Dutch collaboration aims to develop the first thermal biomimetic sensor for the Point-of-care (PoC) detection of malaria. Learn more about Rocio's research in her introductory video. 

Aranka Viviënne Ballering is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Psychiatry of the University Medical Center Groningen. She recently started establishing her own intersectional research line focusing on stigmatization towards people with persistent somatic symptoms (PSS). PSS are symptoms for which often no organic cause can be found after adequate diagnostics. It is known that symptoms are differently perceived in women and men, but also by women and men. With the DWSF travel grant, she will visit a sociological research group at Ghent University to study sex and gender differences in stigmatization (i.e. stereotyping and prejudicing) towards people with PSS via an experimental vignette design. Learn more about Aranka's research in her introductory video. 

Lotte van Burgsteden is Assistant Professor of Language and Communication at VU Amsterdam. She focuses on the real-life establishment of dialogue in contested and polarized settings. Amidst growing societal polarization, she wants to further explore how dialogue can foster depolarization. She employs the unique method of conversation analysis and other qualitative methods (interviews, focus groups) to investigate interaction. With the DWSF travel grant she will visit Prof. Geoffrey Raymond, a well-known scholar in the fields of sociology and conversation analysis in Santa Barbara, California to work on a collaborative research project on polarization in political debates and journalism. Learn more about Lotte's research in her introductory video. 

Lilith Lee is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Humanities with a specialty in the History of Philosophy at VU Amsterdam. With the DWSF travel grant she will visit fin-de-siècle archival collections pertaining to Anglo-Chinese reformer-philosophers Dr LIM Boon Keng and TAN Teck Soon, the only ‘Asiatic’ members of the Straits Philosophical Society (1893–c.1921) in Singapore (then: British Straits Settlements). Lee’s research concerns reconstructing their philosophies and their significances within the (anti-)colonial, inter-imperial, and world-philosophical practices of their day—such as the 1911 First Universal Races Congress, their fueling of Confucian revivalism in British and Dutch colonies, and interactions with South Asian & Anglo-American Idealist intelligentsia then. She will visit multiple archives in Singapore in preparation of an anthology centering LIM & TAN’s philosophies and will present her research at the XXV World Congress of Philosophy (Rome, Aug 2024).

Sangita Swapnasrita is a chemical engineer working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences (Cell Biology Inspired Tissue Engineering Department) at Maastricht University. She has a background in computational modelling of kidney toxin transport and kidney-assist devices and is working on a project to develop an integrated patient and device computational model. With the DWSF travel grant she will visit the lab of professor Joanna Stachowska-Pietka at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, whose expertise in computational peritoneal dialysis revolves around advanced computational methods in the field of biomedical engineering, particularly peritoneal dialysis (PD). The research visit would enable integrating knowledge of modelling solute kinetics in different patients and dialysis modes with Sangita’s expertise in transport equations and modelling. Learn more about Sangita's research in her introductory video.

Bárbara Varassi Pega completed her PhD at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts at Leiden University, as part of the docARTES program. She now works as an artistic research coach in the Master of Music at Codarts University of the Arts, Rotterdam, where she also coordinates the Tango (World Music) Department and teaches piano and ensemble. She also holds an artistic research coach position in the Master of Music at Fontys University of Fine and Performing Arts, Tilburg, the Netherlands, where she is finishing up on a research project on water, climate change and artistic creation. She will use the DWSF travel grant to visit the Universidad Nacional de La Plata in Argentina. The overarching goal of her upcoming post-doctoral research project is to catalyze artistic research and cultural exchange, fostering international collaboration between Codarts University of the Arts in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP), in Argentina. At the heart of this initiative is the creative practice of River Plate tango music, spanning its performance, arrangement, composition, and artistic research. Specifically centered on advancing the curriculum at both institutions, it positions Codarts' World Music – Tango – Department as a unique hub for formal education in world music. Conversely, Argentina stands as the birthplace of tango music, hosting a rich pool of accomplished musicians actively shaping the contemporary music scene. Their innovative approaches to arranging, composing, and performing tango music serve as a valuable source for the Netherlands and Codarts, providing inspiration and exemplary practices. Learn more about Barbara's research in her introductory video.

Margot van de Weijer is a an assistant professor at Amsterdam UMC. Her work is focused on examining the comorbidity between substance use and psychiatric disorders. Specifically, she investigates why, how, and when substance use (e.g., smoking, alcohol use) may causally lead to psychiatric outcomes (e.g., depression, schizophrenia), and vice versa. Essential to answering these questions is the use of several methods that allow us to, under certain assumptions, examine causality. A particularly innovative and powerful approach for causal inference that lies at the intersection between epidemiology and genetics is Mendelian Randomization (MR). MR allows researchers to study causal associations between an exposure and outcome by using genetic variants associated with an exposure as instruments in instrumental variable analysis. With the DWSF travel grant Margot will visit the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit (IEU) at the University of Bristol that lies at the heart of MR advancement and set op collaborations with MR experts. She will also attend the International Conference on Mendelian Randomization, a conference that brings together MR researchers from around the globe. Learn more about Margot's research in her introductory video.

 

Margot van de Weijer and LNVH board member Tanya Bondarouk at the DWSF award ceremony during the LNVH Spring Symposium 2024

 

 

 

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Call Closed for the 2023-2024 Distinguished Women Scientists Fund 

The call for the LNVH Distinguished Women Scientists Fund (DWSF) 2023-2024 is now closed. The LNVH created the travel grant 11 years ago at the request of prof. dr. Anne Cutler, former director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and emeritus professor of Comparative Language Psychology at Radboud University Nijmegen. On the occasion of her retirement, she asked her colleagues and friends to forgo parting gifts and instead donate to the LNVH. 

This year women scientists can once again benefit from this travel grant. Currently 6 applications are rewarded per call. The travel grant is intended for women postdocs (up to 3 years after their PhD and from all disciplines) who wish to travel abroad as part of their research projects. Find the rules and conditions and the application form via the links below.

In case of questions, please contact the LNVH bureau via 030 600 1361 | info@lnvh.nl.

• Rules and conditions
• Application form

 

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 DWSF Laureates 2022-23

The LNVH board and bureau are pleased to announce the 2022-23 Distinghuished Women Scientists Fund laureates. This year the following 6 laureates will receive the DWSF travel grant: 

 

Annelisa Cornel

Annelisa Cornel is postdoctoral researcher at the Prinses Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology. With the travel grant, she will visit the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Cornel researches immunotherapy as a treatment of high-risk neuroblastoma (NBL). Immunotherapy shows promise as an effective therapeutic strategy, however, identification of tumor-specific targets is hampered by the scarcity of protein-altering DNA mutations in NBL. Cornel investigates how to direct the patient’s immune cells towards novel NBL-specific proteins identified in the Princess Máxima Center. At the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center,  she will acquire the specialized skill set of working with an advanced technique for identification of these proteins. As a suitable mass spectrometer will be acquired when the cell therapy facility of the Princess Máxima Center opens in 2024, this will allow Cornel to implement my obtained skills upon return to the center.

 

Eefje de Bont

Eefje de Bont is Postdoctoral researcher at Maastricht University. With the travel grant, she will visit her international colleagues at Oxford University. Here she will compare the findings of her previous work on general practitioner (GP) out-of-hours care on urinary tract infections (UTIs) in the Netherlands with a large database on this topic in the UK. This is important, because UTI’s are one of the most common infections in primary care. Previous research showed that GPs find it challenging to diagnose UTIs and frequently divert from guidelines, leading to unwarranted antibiotic prescriptions and inefficient use of diagnostics such as urinary cultures. This visit will help de Bont acquire a better understanding how to improve future UTI management in general and during out-of-hours care specifically.

 

Nerea Arrarte Terreros

Nerea Arrarte Terreros is postdoctoral researcher at Amsterdam University Medical Centers. With the travel grant, she will visit the PhySense group at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain to study the influence of cardiac conditions on stroke outcome using image analysis and in-silico models. The visit will allow her to combine Universitat Pompeu Fabra’s extensive knowledge on computer modelling and simulation of the heart and cardiovascular diseases and the Amsterdam University Medical Centers’ expertise on patient data and image analysis. The trip will allow Arrarte Terreros to gain more technical knowledge on computational fluid simulations and be actively involved in the development of such models.

 

Christel van Eck

Christel van Eck is Assistant Professor Climate Change Communication at the University of Amsterdam. She will use the travel grant for a research visit to Professor Michael Brüggemann at Hamburg University. Together they will work on a project investigating climate change depolarization. The start of the project will involve reviewing climate change depolarization papers and developing a critical argument. The goal is to publish, at least, a critical commentary paper on the topic. In the Netherlands, van Eck regularly gives talks and workshops about climate change communication and polarization. Hence, she can use the acquired knowledge on climate change depolarization in public outreach activities.

 

Loreta Muscarella

Loreta Muscarella is postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University. She researches sustainable materials, more specifically metal-halide perovskites. This type of material is particularly interesting, because it emerges as a good candidate for efficient solar cells. With the travel grant, Muscarella will visit an international conference for approximately 400 researchers working on sustainable materials. During this conference, she will present her work on novel environmental friendly perovskite-based materials. In addition, she will also organize a symposium, as a part of the conference. Muscarella will also use the travel grant to visit the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, where she will work on experiments that measure, for the first time, the dynamics of the degradation of perovskite materials under extreme conditions.

 

Rozanne Versendaal

Rozanne Versendaal is Assistant Professor of French Literature and Culture at Utrecht University, specialising in Late Medieval French Literature. With the travel grant, she will visit the Department of French Literature at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Here she will work together with an excellent community of researchers working on Late Medieval French literature, and expand her international network by attending the seminars that are organised within the Department. Additionally, Versendaal will have access to several extensive book collections of the 15th and 16th centuries, held by, among others, the Bibliothèque de Genève and the Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire de Lausanne. These libraries house the necessary literature in which to ground her research on the parodic, festive literature and culture of the Late Middle Ages.

 

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DWSF Laureates 2021-22

The LNVH board and bureau are pleased to announce the 2021-22 Distinghuished Women Scientists Fund laureates! Currently 6 applications are rewarded per call. This year the following 6 laureates will receive the DWSF travel grant: 

 

Jeewanthi Gangani Sirisena

Jeewanthi Gangani Sirisena is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Twente, Faculty of Engineering Technology, Department of Water Engineering and management. With the travel grant she will attend a workshop at The UNESCO-Madanjeet Singh Centre for South Asia Water Management (UMCSAWM) at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. Jeewa has a sound knowledge of future variations in climate and human activities and subsequent hydrological responses at basin and regional scales. With this workshop - and future reserach collaborations with the University of Moratuwa - she will advance her expertise in effectively conveying the scientific findings to stakeholders (e.g., farmers, government officials, NGOs, and water resources planners and managers) regarding risk, vulnerability, and recovery costs involved with maladaptation. After completing this training program, she will be able to be involved in disaster risk and management (DRR) studies conducted by the Faculty of Engineering Technology, University of Twente and contribute to the other project team members from different organizations concerning DRR.

 

Kelly de Ligt

Kelly de Ligt is a postdoctoral researcher at the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. With the travel grant she will visit the University Hospital in Innsbruck, Austria where they have successfully implemented patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) in clinical practice. PROMs are validated questionnaires that measure health-related quality of life (HRQoL), functioning, and symptoms in patients. In Innsbruck, they apply this data to further personalize treatment and follow-up, as they have insight into which patients suffer from impaired functioning and symptoms, what their characteristics are, and what support they need. Within the field of PROMs, Kelly’s research is focused on very similar topics as the ones they work on in Innsbruck. The visit is the start of a shared initiative in which they will harmonise PROMs data from both facilities. Based on this experience, they write recommendations for bringing PROMs data together internationally for research purposes. This is important: many hospitals in Europe collect PROMs, but data remains very fragmented, and would be more valuable for patients if brought together. The recommendations will enable researchers to extend the initiative with data from other facilities in the future, creating an internationally harmonised big-data set for PROMs data. With the data from both institutes, Kelly, together with her colleagues at Innsbruck, will build a prediction model for breast cancer patients that predicts which patients are faced with lowered HRQoL, functioning, and symptoms after cancer treatment. In the future, they will refine this model every time we add PROMs-data to our database. (Click here for video portrait)

 

Natashe Lemos Dekker

Natashe Lemos Dekker is a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University, Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology within the ERC project “Globalizing Palliative Care”. With the travel grant she will spend a period as a visiting fellow at the UCLA Department of Anthropology, a highly esteemed institute and leading in the field of medical and psychological anthropology. She will participate in, and contribute to, their interest group ‘Mind, Medicine, and Culture’, which advocates a critical perspective on health and illness that would greatly benefit Natashe’s own research on end-of-life care. During the visiting fellowship she will write an article based on data she is currently gathering in her ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil, on how older people and their families navigate access to end-of-life care. Being able to participate in the Department’s seminar series, presenting her work, as well as learning from the work of others, will provide fundamental insights in developing the theoretical framework of this article and future publications. She will engage with key scholars in medical and psychological anthropology, including Faculty members Prof. Jason Throop, Prof. Linda Garro, and others. In this regard, the visit will also play a pivotal role in creating possibilities for future international collaborations. (Click here for video portrait)

 

Olya Kudina

Olya Kudina is an Assistant Professor at TU Delft, Policy and Management Department, Ethics/Philosophy of Technology Section. With the travel grant she will travel to the Yale Interdisciplinary Bioethics Center (New Haven, USA) for a research collaboration with the Center’s staff and colleagues from the Yale School of Medicine on facilitating mental wellbeing among young adults with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ethics of technology. Recent research has revealed that AI-based conversational agents help young adults with managing anxiety. However, it is difficult to develop conversational agents that balance medical needs with human values (e.g., engagement and trustworthiness). This gap can be bridged by relying on the ethics method of Value Sensitive Design (VSD) to prevent value conflicts, understand potential value changes and help align multiple considerations. On her research trip to Yale, Olya would like (1) to conduct field research about the pioneering AI-based application (i.e. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy conversational agent) for treating anxiety and addiction in young adults, developed by Patricia Simon; (2) understand how it impacts the values and norm systems in the care practice; and (3) with the field findings in mind and together with Patricia Simon and her TU Delft colleagues, begin to develop a value-based and AI-infused conversational agent that monitors and anticipates the shifts in the mental wellbeing of young adults, adapts to the users’ needs and fosters a proactive attitude towards mental wellbeing.

 

Renée Verdiesen

Renée Verdiesen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI). With the travel grant she will visit professor Chadeau-Hyam and his group at Imperial College London. At the NKI, Renée conducts several projects focused on characterizing the mechanisms that play a role in the development of the different molecular breast cancer subtypes. This is important because understanding differences in both aetiology and prognosis across breast cancer subtypes will further improve breast cancer risk stratification and ultimately survival. The research group Renée is part of leads the B-CAST project, which aims to understand the determinants of risk and prognosis of molecular breast cancer subtypes (http://www.b-cast.eu). At Imperial College, professor Chadeau-Hyam and his group are experts in the application of multi-omics analyses. Moreover, they previously conducted several studies that included gene expression and epigenetic data from studies that are also included in B-CAST. Renée aims to perform a pilot study to explore the feasibility of integrating B-CAST data with these previously collected omics data. In addition, there is ample data available at Imperial College that she can use to develop her multi-omics data analysis skills. To work on this dataset will not improve only her analytical skills but will also open new avenues for her future research beyond the B-CAST resource. After her visit, she will transfer her newly acquired analytical skills to the research group at the NKI. (Click here for video portrait)

Due to personal circumstances, Mehrnoosh Shokouhi will take over Renee Verdiesen's travel grant. She will be using the travel grant to undertake a research trip with the same objective.

 

 Titia Geertje Meijer

Titia Geertje Meijer is AIOS and postdoctoral researcher at Erasmus Medical Centre Rotterdam. She completed a PhD project in the fields of homologous recombination repair in breast cancer. With the travel grant she will visit the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting. At this meeting she will present the newest data on the ex vivo functional test she developed with her colleguaes to select breast cancer patients for targeted therapy (PARP inhibitors) based on a real-time read-out. Titia has decided to becaome a medical pathologist. She wants to bridge the gap between basis research and clinical practice. She would like to integrate both worlds more in her daily practice. She therefore pursues a career as a postdoctoral researcher alongside working as a resident pathologist. Attending the AACR annual meeting will help her to broaden her horizon and explore different research topics that she would like to partake in. (Click here for video portrait) 

 

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DWSF Laureates 2020

 The LNVH board and bureau are pleased to announce the 2020-21 Distinghuished Women Scientists Fund laureates! In celebration of LNVH’s 20th anniversary, this year not 6 – but 7 laureates will receive the DWSF travel grant. This travel grant allows the laureates to travel abroad for their research.

Luisa Schneider is an Assistant Professor at VU Amsterdam, where she specializes in the anthropology of intimacy, violence and law. With the travel grant, she will travel to Sierra Leone, to further her collaboration with judges, NGOs and grassroots on a study about the riot that occurred after a man who was tested positively for COVID-19 was brought to the country’s central prison for men, Pademba Road to be imprisoned.

Chiara Sironi is a postdoctoral researcher at Maastricht University, Department of Data Science & Knowledge Engineering. With the travel grant, she will be visiting the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), Shenzhen, China. During this visit, she will extend her earlier research topic of self-adaptive search algorithms that are able to address a wide variety of (video) games without requiring human intervention or prior, game-specific knowledge. This research will be extended to include automatic generation of new algorithms, with application not only to games, but also to real world problems. This would bring her research closer to Artificial General Intelligence, which aims at creating agents that are able to perform many heterogeneous tasks in a wide variety of domains, of which games are only a subset. (Click for video portrait)

Oihane Abiega is a postdoctoral researcher at the Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. With the travel grant, she will visit the Center for Brain and Disease Research, VIB-KU Leuven (Belgium) to perform single-cell RNA sequencing to molecularly characterize the reactive-neural stem cell (react-NSC) population in the hippocampus of epileptic mice. These react-NSCs lose their neurogenic function and contribute to some of the main pathological hallmarks of Epilepsy. This experiment will be key in her research project and a big step forward in our understanding of what drives the change of normal NSCs into react-NSCs and how to specifically target them, effectively contributing to their use as future therapeutic target.

Ona Ilozumba is a postdoctoral researcher/lecturer at the Athena Institute at VU Amsterdam. With the travel grant, she will conduct fieldwork within the context of her existing project at the Uganda Cancer Institute. The projects objective is to develop, implement and evaluate an Interactive Voice System (IVR) for cancer awareness in Uganda. The trip would involve a qualitative evaluation (interviews and focus group discussion with current system users) to understand users experiences, in order to guide further modification of the system. Additionally, she will explore preferred avenues for the promotion of the IVR system to increase the utilization of the system by the general public. (Click for video portrait)

Noortje Kloos is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Twente and Radboudumc, within the field of positive psychology and long-term care for older adults. With the travel grant, she will be working on two lines of research during a four-month stay at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. First, she will be testing a gratitude app (developed at the University of Twente) to improve the well-being of nurses. This will consist of an RCT to test the effectiveness and acceptability of the app for nurses from the Austin Hospital Melbourne. Secondly, she will be participating in an ongoing research on the concept of thriving in older adults: the experienced well-being in the nursing home. Dr. Kloos will join both the analysis of an existing large Swedish dataset, as well as the gathering of new data in two nursing homes in Australia. (Click for video portrait)

Fabiola Müller is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Amsterdam University Medical Centers (department of Medical Psychology) where she conducts research in psycho-oncology. In the Netherlands, individuals from ethnic minority groups are expected to form an increasing proportion of those diagnosed with cancer. However, research on the need for, and efficacy of supportive care in cancer patients from minority groups is scarce in the Netherlands. In the USA, research on ethnic minority groups is much more advanced. With the travel grant, Dr. Müller will visit the Moffitt Cancer Center (Tampa, Florida), which has a large portfolio of research evaluating the role of ethnicity in cancer survivorship and supportive care. Dr. Müller will analyze data on survivorship needs and care in the context of ethnicity, and receive guidance on the challenges and opportunities of assessing ethnicity and socio-cultural factors. She will transfer her gained knowledge and skills to the Netherlands where she aims to conduct research on equity in supportive care in cancer in the Dutch context. (Click for video portrait)

Charlotte Bekker, PhD, is a researcher at Radboudumc, at the department of Pharmacy. With the travel grant, she will visit a research group at the University of Sydney, Australia. Together with the head of the research group, she will work on a new project, focusing on the advancement of research methodologies for medication adherence. The project results will enable researchers to adequately design, conduct and report on high quality studies for medication adherence. 

 

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DWSF Laureates 2019

The LNVH board is pleased to announce the 2019 Distinghuished Women Scientists Fund. This travel grant allows the laureates to travel abroad for their research.

• Anna Schueth is a postdoctoral researcher at Maastricht University, where she works on on optical clearing and light-sheet fluorescence microscopic (LSFM) imaging of large human brain samples for deep imaging of human cortical structures. Her work on LSFM of the optically cleared human brain has been well received in the scientific LSFM community. With the  travel grant she will visit the renowned European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy (LENS) at the University of Florence, Italy, which is hosting leading experts in optics, LSFM and neuro-imaging with a vast knowledge in these fields and a proven track record, such as numerous influential high-impact publications. During her stay, she will perform neuro-LSFM imaging experiments, followed by data analysis using in-house developed software and analysis pipelines.
  
  
• Kaya Peerdeman is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at Leiden University. Her research is focused on enhancing our understanding of the mechanisms of placebo and nocebo effects (e.g., expectancies, learning processes such as conditioning and instructions, and physiological correlates) on pain and other physical symptoms. The travel grant will allow her to visit the worldwide acclaimed neuroscientist Prof. dr. Christian Büchel and members from his renowned lab at the Institute of Systems Neuroscience of the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf in Hamburg, Germany. There, she will collaboratively develop a concrete research plan, that builds on her two recent innovative psychophysiological experiments. In these experiments she examined the limits of positive expectancy effects (the core mechanism of placebo effects) on pain.
  
  
• Lucía Berro Pizzarossa is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Groningen, where she is researching the intersection of gender, health and law in relation to smoking during pregnancy. This travel grant allows her to visit the Centre for Public Health Law Research at the University of Temple, where she will collaborate on a project which focuses on self-managed abortion with medication. This is an emerging topic of crucial importance in the field of sexual and reproductive rights that have garnered the attention of agencies such as the WHO and that is currently underexplored from a human rights perspective.
  
  
• Maria Luce Lupetti is a postdoctoral researcher at TUDelft. She is conducting her research as a postdoctoral fellow at AiTech, a mission-oriented science, design, engineering and business innovation initiative, focused on autonomous technology and human responsibility in digital societies. Her research is focused on how to shape appropriate forms of interaction in the design of human partnership with AI. With this travel grant, she will have the opportunity of investigating current approaches and experiences at the intersection between design and AI at KAIST University in South Korea.
  
  
• Sarah Burke is a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University, where she is involved in the longitudinal "Brainlinks" study on brain development in relation to prosocial behavior during adolescence. The travel fund will allow her to visit the lab of Dr. Jamie Feusner, Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioural Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles. Given Dr. Feusner’s expertise in psychiatric conditions that involve distortions of body perception (anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder), his excellent technical resources and lab support, allowing for sophisticated data analyses, a visit to his lab will result in a fruitful exchange ideas for a new fMRI experiment that focuses on developmental changes in own-body perception in gender diverse youth.
  
  
• Lieke Melsen is an assistant professor at Wageningen University & Research. Her research focusses on uncertainty in hydrological models. Hydrological models are frequently used to support decision making, for instance related to dike heightening and flood mitigation measures. The travel grant will give her the opportunity to visit The Helmholtz Zentrum für Umweltforschung (UFZ) in Leipzig. The UFZ has developed a computational infrastructure to perform multi-model runs over the whole European domain. There, she will get acquainted with their infrastructure and data, and run the MMF using this infrastructure over the European domain, which will be highly useful to obtain insights in spatial patterns of model structure uncertainty.

 

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DWSF Laureates 2018

The LNVH board is pleased to announce the 2018 Distinghuished Women Scientists Fund. This travel grant allows the laureates to travel abroad for their research.

• Lorena De Vita is an assistant professor in the History of International Relations at Utrecht University. She is analyzing how diplomacy operates in the wake of widespread polital violence, and will be focusing on the work and experiences of representatives of states, international organizations and transnational humanitarian networks in Isral/Palestine after 1948. 
• Whitney Freeze is postdoctoral researcher at Maastricht University. She has been working on the rol of blood-brain barrier leakage in demantia and intracerebral haemorrhage. At Harvard Medical School, she will be receiving extensive training in post-mortem MRI of the brain. 
• Anne Marije Kaag is postdoctoral researcher at Amsterdam UMC. She is working on the relation between acohol use disorders and cognitive dysfunction. The travel grant allows her to start a scientific collaboration on a project that combines two datasets acquired at the AMC and at the Karolinksa Institue in Stockholm. 
• Hannah Nohlen is an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam. She is collaborating with the Computational Affective Neuroscience (CAN) lab at the University of toronto, n a project aimed at deciphering how the brain responds to evaluatively conflicting information and processes it to produce positive, negative or mixed judgments.
• Eva van Roekel is an assistant professor at VU University, Amsterdam. She is exploring how peacekeepers navigate challenges to their physichal and mental health in different social, military and clinical environments. At the Training Centre for Peace Operation in Latin America (Buenos Aires), she will be conducting interviews with military and medical staff.
• Masha van der Sande is postdoctoral researcher at University of Amsterdam and Wageningen University. She is a tropical forest ecologist and will be working at the Univeristy of Sao Paulo and the University of Campinas, to further study shifts in trait composition over timescales relevant to tree life cycles and ecosystem assembly.

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DWSF Laureates 2017

The LNVH board is pleased to announce the 2017 Distinghuished Women Scientists Fund. This travel grant allows the laureates to travel abroad for their research.

• Miranda Bloem is postdoctoral researcher in the research project 'Duchess Mary of Guelders and her prayer book', at the Radboud University Nijmegen. She will be visiting the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore to study the 15th-century Greiffenklau Missal. 
• Fleur Bouwer is postdoctoral researcher at the department of psychology of the University of Amsterdam. She will travel to the Music and Neuroscience lab at the Brain and Mind Institute in London (Canada), to further investigate how our brains optimize perception by predicting what is likely to happen next, using musical rythms. 
• Anke Klein is postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. The travel grant allows her to include her work in a trial conducted by Centre for Emotional Health (Australia) on underlying mechanisms related to childhood social anxiety. 
• Mandy Lauw is postdoctoral researcher and MD resident internal medicine at the Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam. She will be staying at McMaster University in Hamilton (Canada) to better understand the mechanisms of stroke in patients with atrial fibrillation. 

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DWSF Laureates 2016

The LNVH board is pleased to announce the 2016 Distinghuished Women Scientists Fund. This travel grant allows the laureates to travel abroad for their research.

• Jessica Alleva is assistant professor at Maastricht University. She is interested in investigating and developing techniques to improve body image.
• Camille Creyghton is lecturer at the University of Amsterdam. She studies epistemelogical and ethical presuppositions underlying 19th-century French historians' scholarly practices. 
• Mathilde Hagens is postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Earth Sciences, Utrecht University. She focuses on mechanisms of pH changes in coastal and open oceans.
• Janet Vos is postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Human genetics, Radboud university medical center. Her research includes the identification, risk assessment and surveillance of hereditary cancer.

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DWSF Laureates 2015

The LNVH board is pleased to announce the 2015 Distinghuished Women Scientists Fund. This travel grant allows the laureates to travel abroad for their research.

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DWSF Laureates 2014

Distinguished Women Scientists Fund DWSF 2014:

In 2012 the Dutch Network of Women Professors created the Distinguished Women Scientists Fund, a travel grant for female postdocs - up to 3 years after promotion and residing in the Netherlands - who wish to travel abroad in the framework of their discipline. Under certain conditions the period of 3 years can be extended.

Laureates 2014

Hieke Huistra is as a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University, working on the research project “Risking Lives: Constructing Risk Group Identities in Dutch Public Discourse in the Twentieth Century”. website

Laura Mann is an economic sociologist at the African Studies Centre Leiden (ASC). Her research focuses on the political economy of markets and state-building in Africa. website

Annelieke Roest is a postdoctoral researcher at the Interdisciplinary Center Pyschopathology and Emotion regulation (ICPE) of the University of Groningen (Faculty of Medical Sciences). She performs research on anxiety in individuals with and without medical diseases. website

Annelies Veraart is a postdoctoral Researcher Microbial Ecology at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology. website

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Rules & Conditions, application form

Distinguished Women Scientists Fund 2015, Rules & Conditions:

The travel grant:
Created for female postdocs up to three years after promotion, and residing and working in the Netherlands, who, within the framework of their discipline, wish to travel abroad. The maximum amount for a travel grant is 1.500 euro.

The candidate:
Postdoc, up to three years after promotion, and residing and working in the Netherlands. The 3-year term can be extended to 18 months per child, due to pregnancy and birth, or by a term of, at most, 18 months, as a compensation for the necessary care given to family members, or other relevant family circumstances. This will be evaluated for each individual application.

Conditions:

• The travel grant is solely intended for journeys made within the framework of the discipline – e.g. visiting a foreign scientific institution; field- or archive research, or an internship.
• The candidate can submit a budget for travel-related costs, to a maximum of the amount stated above.
• The candidate is obliged to take out a travel insurance, at least covering cancellation. If the situation arises, costs that are not covered by the insurance can be passed on to the candidate. This will be evaluated for each individual case.

Judging Criteria:
Relevance to the candidate's career. 

How to apply:
Candidates can apply for a travel grant by sending in (to info@lnvh.nl) the application form. This form can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.

Time path:
Deadline for submitting applications: October 1^st, 2015
Announcement of allocations: mid-December, 2015

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DWSF 2012 Anne Cutler

Distinguished Women Scientists Fund DWSF 2012 Anne Cutler:

In 2012 heeft het Landelijk Netwerk Vrouwelijke Hoogleraren het Distinguished Women Scientists Fund opgericht. De aanleiding hiervoor was het verzoek van prof.dr. Anne Cutler aan haar collega’s en vrienden om haar ter gelegenheid van haar emeritaat geen afscheidscadeau te geven maar een bedrag te doneren aan het LNVH. Het bestuur van het LNVH heeft deze geste in dank aanvaard en besloten het totaal te ontvangen bedrag te verdubbelen en in de vorm van een reisbeurs ter beschikking te stellen aan vrouwelijke in Nederland werkende postdocs die tot drie jaar na hun promotie (met verlengingsclausule) in 2012 in het kader van het vakgebied van Anne Cutler, psycholinguïstiek, een buitenlandse reis willen maken. In 2013 en 2014 gelden andere vakgebieden. Het fonds loopt vooralsnog tot 2015.

Voor 2012 is het fonds DWSF 2012 Anne Cutler genoemd. In 2013 en 2014 zal de naam Distinguished Women Scientists Fund zijn.

Laureaten DWSF 2012 / Anne Cutler zijn:

• Susanne Brouwer, postdoctoraal onderzoeken aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, die een presentatie zal houden op het 11th International Symposium of Psycholinguistics in Spanje;
• Caroline Junge, post doc aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam, voor een Workshop on Infant Language Development (WILD) in San Sebastian;
• Anja Schüppert, post doc aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, voor onderzoek aan het Laboratoire Parole et Language, Université d'Aix-Marseille in Frankrijk.