The tube connecting the throat with the stomach is called the gullet. Cancer of the gullet does not just appear. Years before cancer appears, the mucous membrane of the gullet changes form. This new mucous membrane is called ‘metaplasia’. We do not yet understand where metaplasia comes from. The gullet has glands where metaplasia might come from. In this project, I will make the first-ever 2D model of these glands of the gullet. By understanding where metaplasia of the gullet comes from we can eventually learn how to prevent metaplasia and cancer of the gullet.

Brown adipose tissue expends energy to produce heat and maintain body temperature. Stimulation of brown adipose tissue is therefore considered a treatment option to battle obesity. Women more frequently have active brown adipose tissue than men. We will employ these sex differences to obtain a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms regulating brown adipose tissue activity using human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSc). By comparing male and female iPSc-derived human brown adipocytes, we aim to identify secreted factors that enhance brown adipose mass and activity. These proteins are ideal targets to enhance energy expenditure and treat obesity and its comorbidities.

Sound-induced vibrations within the inner ear are typically in the nanometer range. Their measurement requires the use of highly sensitive equipment such as laser interferometers. We propose to build a laser interferometer setup for the in vivo measurement of vibrations in the sensitive inner ears of rodents and amphibians. With the setup it will be possible to measure the sound-evoked responses of inner ear structures over a wide dynamic range of sound intensities. This makes the setup ideally suited to study the complex nonlinear characteristics of inner ear responses. It is known that cochlear nonlinearity is essential for a proper function of the inner ear, but the mechanisms underlying this nonlinear behaviour are not well understood. We will use a systems analysis approach to tackle this problem. Specific hypotheses concerning the nature of nonlinear inner ear operation will be tested by recording cochlear responses to tailored stimuli. The setup we propose to build is optimized for this systems analysis approach in several aspects: it contains a facility for neural recordings; dedicated hardware and custom-made software provide the capacity for presenting complex, long-duration auditory stimuli and for the uninterrupted recording of the cochlear vibration evoked by these nonstandard stimuli; custom-made software enables the experimenter to perform online analyses during the experiment and adaptively change the stimulus parameters for the next measurement. The research plan and the design of the setup is based on previous work by the four members of the research team, whose specializations combine the practical and theoretical skills needed for this project.

Your meat has to eat. A lot. Millions of tons of feed are shipped across oceans to make intensive livestock farming possible. This creates global and local problems. Animal feed production competes with human food production. Soy for feed connects the destruction of the South American rain forest to the Dutch nitrogen crisis. Problems like these will multiply, as the global demand for meat and dairy is burgeoning. Currently, we fail to address these issues properly because of vested economic interests, scientific reductionism, and ad hoc measures. This project will help by offering new historical research on the long-distance and long-term impact of a neglected commodity: livestock feed. By focusing on feed commodities imported from across the globe to Dutch farms between 1954 and 2020, the project’s objectives innovatively contribute to three fields: history of science, environmental history, and global history. The first objective is to demonstrate the significance of imported feed as a scientific technology. The second is to better connect its global production and local consumption by investigating the feed’s invisible impact around the world in cultural, social, environmental, and health terms. This provides an important theoretical contribution to the environmental and global history debate on ‘ghost acres’. To obtain a balanced view, I will analyze a wide variety of sources produced by different stakeholders, and use digital humanities and oral history methodologies. This research is timely, since it is of great democratic value to fully inform the fierce societal debate about ‘factory farms’. We can only decide on the future direction of intensive livestock farming, if we understand the long-term and long-distance societal impact of the feed that makes this farming possible. What we feed our meat determines what we feed ourselves, and matters globally.

The cerebellum, also known as “little brain”, contains more neuronal cells than the rest of the brain combined, however its full function is still unclear. Traditionally the cerebellum has been linked with motor control, but we know now that if early cerebellar development is disrupted, cognitive and emotional processes become compromised. In this project, we propose that the electric activity of cerebellar Purkinje cells around birth is essential for proper brain development and function. By temporally reducing Purkinje cell activity, we aim to unravel novel mechanisms critical to understand the origin of neurodevelopmental disorders and uncover new potential therapeutic interventions.