Participating Research Groups 2024

The capacity of plants to adapt to different altitudes is a fantastic illustration of nature's creativity. It showcases how highly adaptable plants are to flourish in harsh conditions. As one ascends higher into the mountains, the air becomes thinner, temperatures drop, light intensifies and oxygen levels decrease. In response, plants have evolved unique strategies to conquer these harsh conditions.

Some high-altitude plants, like the Himalayan blue poppy, have developed dense hairs and waxy coatings on their leaves to reduce water loss and protect against extreme temperatures. They also often grow low and compact to minimize exposure to harsh winds. Additionally, their photosynthetic processes have adapted to function efficiently in low-oxygen conditions.

Multiple altitude adaptations exemplify the astonishing resilience of plants, offering a fascinating insight into their capacity to flourish even in the most unforgiving environments. Regardless of what coping mechanism plants utilize to adapt to altitude, how they are able to sense altitude or get 'high' remains a mystery that we are eager to solve.

Scientist: Moe Abbas

We are constantly surrounded by stimuli, and it is harder than ever to concentrate undisturbed. This research shows why it is good to shut your brain off from stimuli once in a while. Giving your brain a break allows your ability to concentrate to recover. So "napping" is not boring, it's actually very important!

The goal of AttentionLab is to study our perception and attention in the broadest sense. To this end, the AttentionLab uses various methods, such as eye movement registration, brain measurements, and psychophysics. For example, by studying attention in different patient populations, such as hemianopsia (half-sided blindness), or patients with memory problems. The aim is to understand how we create a perception of our world.

Scientist: Stefan van der Stigchel

Unlocking the full potential of materials, the Human Interactive Materials research group explores the possibilities of creating smart, interactive materials like silicones, hydrogels, liquid crystal networks, and elastomers. These materials can communicate between man and machine and even between machines, bringing the future of soft robotics one step closer. The aim is to create self-learning, adaptable materials that can sense their environment, leading to the development of nature-inspired, intelligent soft machines. The research is highly multidisciplinary with specialists in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, chemical enginering, materials science, physics, chemistry and industrial design and pioneers in haptics, soft robotics, advanced optics, artificial neurogenesis, and artificial neural-network impulse communications.

Scientist: Danqing Liu

An increasing number of scientists claims that it is necessary to demythologize drugs and to revise their perception as a threat to society. Latin America plays a key role in this debate, as psychoactive substances are part of its natural resources and of indigenous ancestral knowledge. With an interdisciplinary team, this project analyzes the cultural perception of ‘drugs’ in relation to legalization, cultural heritage, tourism and pharmacology. The main aim of this project is to analyze the changing perceptions of ‘drugs’ in Latin America from the subcontinent’s independence to our present day (1820-2020). In some cases, certain plants or substances have been demonized; sometimes, they have been valued because of their potential to cure, inspire, or emancipate. The project focuses on the representation of ayahuasca, peyote and coca(ine) over time, asking three important questions: a) what is the connection between the perception of psychoactive substances as drugs and persisting structures of coloniality? b) what is the role of affect and emotion in the representation of these substances? c) how is the relationship between these plants as material substances/agents and the human subject perceived?

Scientists: Brigitte Adriaensen & Ana Laura Puebla Camacho

A microorganism’s membrane is effectively its skin. Just like our skin, the membrane responds strongly to the environment. Our skin becomes darker if more sunlight falls on it or shivers if it is cold. Similarly, changes also take place in the membranes of microorganisms. These can tell you something about the climate under which the organism is living or has lived.

In particular, the possibility to derive conditions from the past based on the composition of a membrane offers many interesting possibilities. By searching for fossils of membranes in seafloors we can learn what the sea temperature was in a certain period, because the lipid molecules from these membranes can remain intact for millions of years. However, to do that we first need to investigate 'modern' species to find out how their composition changes when allowed to grow at different temperatures. Ultimately, this research could contribute to understanding the earth’s climate in the past and therefore to prognoses for the climate of the future.

Scientist: Laura Villanueva

In the last decades, biological experiments are becoming more and more advanced. For example, a single cell RNA sequencing machine can split a tissue sample into individual cells, and then measure what genes are currently expressed in each of the cells individually, for all 20,000 genes in the genome. These measurements can give us an enormous amount of information about biological processes. But biology is very complicated. Knowing how to interpret these huge datasets is a cutting-edge challenge of modern science.

This is where mathematics comes into play. Mathematics provides the interface between data and biological interpretation, and interdisciplinary collaborations between mathematicians and biologists have given rise to new analysis techniques all across biology.

Together with my collaborators, we develop tools to let the data tell us what biology is hiding beneath the surface, without putting in our own assumptions about what we think is going on. The methods we use come from a field of mathematics called Topology, which studies shapes and spaces. Our aim is to let the shape of the data speak for itself and lead us to new biological insights.

Scientist: Renee Hoekzema

Fungi form mycelia within substrates such as soil or logs of wood. After colonization of the substrate, fungi form reproductive structures such as mushrooms. Both the mycelium and the reproductive structures can be used to enable the transition to a circular economy. For instance, we use fungi to produce alternative protein sources to replace meat or to purify wastewater from pesticides, pharmaceuticals, PFAS and dyes. In addition, we use fungi to produce (smart) materials.

Scientist: Han Wösten

How life originated on Earth is considered one of the great unresolved questions of science and philosophy. One of the main challenges in this research field, is that beyond the fossil record we cannot retrace the steps of life, and therefore the steps that transformed simple inanimate molecules into complex systems remain unknown. Moreover, evolution is not a linear process and life often discards what was once useful, so we do not have access to this information anymore. It is no surprise then, that scientific answers continue to elude us, and we must look at life from both ends - the now, and the world in which first life emerged. Chemistry contributes to our efforts to understand the origin of life by mimicking plausible pathways through which life-like behavior could have emerged from an initially random and lifeless mixture of molecules. Organic chemists have developed plausible prebiotic metabolic cycles, others have focused on elucidating how the first RNA was formed, and biochemists have imagined how early RNA strands could have replicated themselves in the absence of enzymes and other protein machineries. Finally, supramolecular chemists are investigating how living systems can be maintained out of an equilibrium state - using chemical gradients.

Scientists: Nathalie Katsonis & Dhanya Babu

Ever since the Middle Ages, the Netherlands has also been called the 'Low Countries'. Yet there was a time when our country was quite a bit above sea level. We pumped ourselves down. To get the land drier we dug ditches and pumped out groundwater so grass could grow, and cows could graze. What we did not sufficiently understand was that our soil was full of organic matter, which slowly decays under the influence of oxygen. Pumping away the water opened a Pandora's box: CO2 emissions, failing house foundations, flood risk, farmers who can no longer keep livestock, and finally the changing landscape. We also take material out of the ground (oil, gas, salt, coal, marl, heat) and put material into it (gas, CO2). All this influences the height of the land. What do the Netherlands of the future look like, where can we still live, how fast are changes happening, what processes are involved, and what can we do about it?

To provide perspective for the future, we must be able to precisely measure, distinguish different scales (in space and in time), and unravel the stacking of effects. This research includes the geodetic analysis of imaging remote sensing data, the influence of the atmosphere on space-geodetic techniques, and the mathematical modeling and physical interpretation of deformation processes.

Scientist: Ramon Hanssen

Advances in biotechnology are rapidly expanding possibilities for engineering life: there are two main trends. The first happens inside bioreactors by reconfiguring manufacturing to be entirely biobased for the aim of producing potentially everything humans might need from food to energy. The second happens out in the world with modified seeds, micro-organisms, animals like salmon or pigs with the aim of improving production for agriculture, cleaning environments with microorganisms. These novel applications have a broad range of contexts and impacts, and beget empirical and ethical questions in both the practice of innovation and usage. Modifying organisms comes with uncertainties concerning issues of safety and security, sharing benefits, and naturalness. Biotechnology is changing how we engineer life to our benefit, leading to serious implications for conceptions of “the good life” for human flourishing.

What do we displace, what do we replace, and what do we actually improve? As the world becomes more complex and uncertain, what are conceptions of the good life that can help us act well with biotechnology? How can we be responsible in this multitude of possibilities and uncertainties? Carrying conceptual and empirical research, this interdisciplinary work seeks to answer these questions, in practice.

Scientist: Zoë Robaey

The cow is an important symbol of the Dutch landscape, the Dutch economy and Dutch eating practices. But it is a controversial symbol. By 2020, more than 2 million cattle were killed in Dutch slaughterhouses, 1.4 million were calves under nine months old. Half of the calves we slaughter are imported from abroad. In our imagination, cows stand in the Dutch landscape, but in reality, they spend most of their short lives in a barn. As a production animal, the cow has traditionally been closely linked to humans. But what do we know about the sociability of the cow? How do cows understand each other? How do cows use their voice and bodily behavior to communicate with each other and with their farmer? How do they establish relationships with other cows, other animals, the environment? Central to these questions are language and the relationships between animals and people. Most linguists say animal language does not exist. Human language and human cognitive abilities are then the standard that other animal species must meet. Because of this anthropocentric perspective, linguistic and cognitive abilities of animals fall short by default. But with rapidly diminishing biodiversity, constantly growing inequalities between humans and other animal species, disappearing habitats for non-human species or too intensive contact causing diseases such as Covid-19, languaging animals does become urgent for linguistics. This project therefore recalibrates the concept of language and problematizes the idea that language is reserved only for humans. The dairy cow is the case study for the 'animal languages' project. This project is carried out in close cooperation with Dutch dairy farmers.

Scientists: Leonie Cornips

Antibiotic resistance has increased in the last decades. This is mainly caused by global misuse and overuse of antibiotics and by transmission of resistance genes between bacteria. By using new technologies, antibiotic resistance in patients can be detected more quickly and efficiently. In recent years, whole genome sequencing has taken a prominent role in our research on bacterial resistance mechanisms. By studying the complete genome of a bacterium, we can discover new resistance mechanisms and are able to investigate outbreaks of resistant bacteria. It is possible to perform bacterial typing and discover transmission routes of resistant bacteria in any setting. Our goal is to implement this technique as a routine diagnostic tool in clinical practice.

Scientist: Heiman Wertheim