Clinici en patiënten vertrouwen op nauwkeurige voorspellingen van de kans op ingrijpende gebeurtenissen zoals dementie, kanker of overlijden om geïnformeerde beslissingen te kunnen nemen over behandelingen en levensstijl. Huidige statistische methodes voor dynamische voorspelling hebben moeite met complexe kenmerken van patiëntgegevens en maken onnodige vereenvoudigingen die kunnen leiden tot onnauwkeurige prognoses. Dit project zal de beperkingen van bestaande methoden aanpakken door DynoSurv te ontwikkelen, een innovatieve statistische methode die dergelijke vereenvoudigingen vermijdt. DynoSurv zal onderzoekers in staat stellen om realistischere risicovoorspellingsmodellen te schatten en te implementeren, waardoor clinici en patiënten voorzien worden van nauwkeurigere prognoses en advies voor behandeling.

Laboratory education is essential to prepare students for a research focused career. However, this education type is stressful for many students. In this project, videolabs will be developed to allow students to practice conducting their experiments prior to their lab day. The videolabs allow students to make mistakes and solve them without consequences for their research results. With these videolabs I create a new digital learning environment for laboratory education in which making mistakes becomes possible. It is expected that my students will be able to experience their laboratory education more stress-free and can also improve their learning results.

The researcher investigates in the laboratory the evolution of interstellar ices aiming to provide a broader picture of how and when the building blocks of life form in space. A special focus is on sulfur-bearing molecules that play an important role in connecting interstellar organics to biologically relevant macromolecules on Earth.

We request an optical/IR postdoc for studies of (proto)clusters during a crucial epoch of their evolution. Several complementary diagnostics will probe protoclusters and their central regions over the redshifts 4 > z > 2 (10% - 20% present age of Universe). Observations of large-scale kinematics, spectral energy distributions and morphologies with the 10m GTC Telescope, Hershel and the HST will investigate cluster evolution, star formation and galaxy assembly. 1. The new tunable narrow-band filter on the 10m GTC will triple the sample of Lyα protoclusters with z > 2. We shall exploit this unique sample to study internal protocluster kinematics and determine the frequency of protocluster sub-clustering. 2. We shall image 8 protoclusters with Hershel/SPIRE to measure the mix of young and old stellar populations and estimate protocluster sizes. 3. Complementary deep HST images will delineate central regions of protoclusters and interactions with their large clumpy central radio galaxies (progenitor brightest cluster galaxies - BCGs). We shall obtain information about physical processes, such as merging, downsizing and AGN feedback. Masses, ages and star formation rates will be measured for the merging satellite galaxies and diffuse light from intergalactic star formation will be analysed. 4. We shall map morphologies of giant ionized gas halos around progenitor BCGs and study their size evolution, their interaction with the protocluster hosts and their origin as possible cooling flows. 5. Comparison with simulations will constrain galaxy and cluster formation models. Substantial observing time was allocated for this project on GTC, HST and Herschel, despite oversubscriptions > 6.

If you would have to name one uniquely human ability, language would likely be an excellent contender. The fact that you are interpreting the patterns on this page and reading the thoughts of another human being is nothing short of amazing. This project aims to study how communication systems emerge as multiple people gradually agree on shared behaviours, and novel languages move from mind to mind. Language-like signals emerge spontaneously in the laboratory when people are asked to communicate through a medium that is linguistically novel to them. When laboratory languages are transmitted from person to person, features of language structure gradually appear. Such experimental methods provide a window into the mechanisms that were likely involved in the early emergence of human language. This project investigates how meaning and structure unfold over time using two suitable test cases. The first case is in the domain of embodied language, where signals have an obvious and clear connection to physical experience: sign language patterns for talking about tools. The second case investigates a more intangible and abstract domain of experience: patterns for talking about time. I will employ various novel methods to study the emergence of these patterns and unravel the essential mechanisms involved and their contribution over time. Laboratory experiments will be used to simulate language emergence with human participants, online crowdsourcing experiments will be conducted to map out people’s cognitive biases on a large scale and novel tools will be developed for quantitative analysis of 3D body tracking data. This will not only open up new ways to run and analyse laboratory experiments in the field of language evolution, a field that increasingly focuses on the gestural modality, but will additionally benefit the fields of gesture and sign language research in general.