29 Veni grants from NWO for researchers in Utrecht

CAR-T cells are a promising new treatment for pediatric leukemia, where patients' immune cells are trained to attack the cancer cells. The goal is to keep the CAR-T cells present in the body to continuously be protected from cancer cells. In some cases, the CAR-T cells disappear shortly after infusion, which may give the leukemia chance to relapse. We do not yet know why the therapy works in one child, but not in the other. In the current research project, we want to learn more on how CAR-T cells behave in the body, and how to prevent them from disappearing. This way, we hope to contribute to further improvement of CAR-T cell treatment.

Governments increasingly rely on the advice of private consultants to design and implement public policies, yet critics warn this may come at a cost. This project examines how consultant contracting affects the Dutch government. It studies whether consultant contracting makes governments dependent on their services, whether consultants strategically promote such dependencies, and whether this undermines public accountability. Using a multi-method approach, this project aims to inform public debate and government policy on the consequences of contracting consultants.
‘Contracting consultants to support the government in performing various tasks has become commonplace in various countries, including the Netherlands. But critics warn that this practice is dangerous. This project will evaluate the veracity of this criticism in the Dutch context and thus evaluate whether and to what extent consultant hiring is a threat to government capacity and accountability.’

Healthcare decisions increasingly rely on data from electronic health records and registries, especially when traditional clinical trials are not feasible. However, studies based on such data are vulnerable to design and analysis errors, which can lead to misleading conclusions. This project develops a digital research assistant that helps researchers conduct observational studies more carefully and transparently. The assistant automatically checks whether key design choices are consistent and highlights assumptions and uncertainties, helping to improve the reliability of evidence derived from real-world healthcare data.

A brain aneurysm is a life-threatening condition of an artery in the head. Aneurysm rupture may cause a fatal stroke. Heritable factors are essential in the development of a brain aneurysm. Many genes have been found that contribute, each one piece of the puzzle. But development of a brain aneurysm was found to be complicated with not one, but many puzzles involved. There is currently no way to link each piece to the right puzzle. In this study, such a method will be developed and used. Ony then can we use all the knowledge to predict or treat brain aneurysms.

Intellectual disability is one of the most common conditions in pediatrics, but parents often receive little information about what caused it and how their child may develop. This project will re-analyze MRI brain scans, metabolic tests and genetic results that are already part of standard care, using new techniques to investigate early brain development. By linking these findings to the abilities of children as they grow up, a prediction of their future development can be made. This may help identify children earlier, give parents clearer expectations and offer access to tailored support.

Childhood cancer cells often look very similar to healthy cells, allowing them to hide from the patients’ immune system. This is particularly true for a rare but aggressive group of childhood cancers: embryonal tumors. This research takes a new approach by revealing hidden targets inside cancer cells and forcing tumors to show these targets to the immune system. This empowers immune cells to recognize and destroy embryonal cancers, opening new possibilities for immunotherapy in children suffering from these aggressive tumors.

Exposure therapy is an effective treatment for anxiety-related disorders, but it is far from optimal: a lot of people do not profit from the treatment or experience a return of fear after therapy. This research proposal builds on new neuroscientific insights into the effects of regular exercise on memory processing. Exercise after exposure is expected to influence the processing of memories formed during treatment in such a way that fear reductions are better maintained in daily life outside the therapy setting. This approach could pave the way to stronger, lasting treatment outcomes and lower healthcare costs for excessive fears.

66 million years ago, an asteroid impact caused a mass extinction that eliminated three-quarters of Earth’s species, including all non-avian dinosaurs. Fossil evidence suggests that animal life recovered much faster in the southern hemisphere than in the North, but it is unclear why. This research tests whether fewer species died in the south to begin with. Since the asteroid hit during northern spring and southern autumn, southern hemisphere animals may have been sheltered for hibernation. By studying fossils of amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals across different latitudes, this project aims to separate initial survival from later recovery patterns.

'Building on my work identifying the season of the End-Cretaceous extinction, this Veni will allow me to dive into how extinction events shape biodiversity—past, present, and future.'

The European Commission has ambitions to create a Silicon Valley–style tech sector. But Silicon Valley didn’t just produce innovation. It exposed how hard digital technologies are to regulate. These technologies move fast, are difficult to understand, and often outpace existing laws. As a result, risks were addressed too late, once Big Tech was already embedded in society, leading to consumer and environmental harms and powerful monopolies with growing influence over democracy. To replicate the benefits of Silicon Valley without importing its problems, Europe’s regulators must do things differently. They must be innovation-ready. This issue is urgent, as Europe seeks greater ‘tech sovereignty’ in digital technology sectors like AI, cloud services, and fintech. This study examines how regulatory agencies can face a growing digital technology sector.

‘This project comes at a critical moment for Europe’s digital future. The EU, governments, ministries, and regulators are right now making plans for how to regulate in ways that safely facilitate European digital tech. Success will depend not only on the quality of rules, but on whether agencies can implement them effectively. This project provides much-needed empirical evidence on what makes regulators innovation ready.’

Some aggressive cancers carry extra DNA circles that sit outside their chromosomes. These circles can contain cancer-driving and drug-resistance genes, appear in many copies, and help tumors to adapt and escape therapy. Strikingly, the circles move around the cell nucleus, where different regions can turn genes on or off, yet tumors still keep these genes highly active. This project will use innovative imaging methods combined with protein mapping, to track where DNA circles are in cancer cells, how they are switched on, and which proteins help them stay active. This may reveal new vulnerabilities to target these aggressive cancer types.

About half of Dutch students follow vocational education (vmbo/mbo), yet it is often seen as an undesirable option. Families prefer other educational tracks, assuming that vocational education does not lead to successful careers. This is unfortunate because vocational workers are urgently needed, for example in healthcare. An important question is whether vocational education itself leads to worse careers, or whether this is because many students come from disadvantaged backgrounds. This project clarifies the labour market value of vocational education by showing when and for whom it leads to good jobs and earnings, and which programmes offer the best prospects.

Climate change is increasing drought and flood risks in the Netherlands, forcing water managers to make difficult choices regarding how and when to adapt existing infrastructure. This project will develop computational tools that help planners explore thousands of possible strategies and test them against diverse climate futures. These tools will show how choices affect farmers, cities, and ecosystems, helping water managers and policymakers design infrastructure that protects against both drought and flood extremes. The methods will be applicable to vulnerable delta regions worldwide.

'My Veni project develops new tools to generate realistic scenarios of evolving compound drought and flooding events, and to identify adaptation strategies that balance competing water uses.'

'Right wing politicians such as Geert Wilders often frame gender diversity as a threat to society and try to appeal to people through the promise of a ‘return to common sense’. This research helps us understand how anti-gender politics positions transgender people outside of this ‘common sense’, but also, how art and activism play a role in re-shaping the aesthetics and politics of gender in public life.'

Lieks Hettinga’s project examines contemporary transgender politics in the Netherlands (2014-2025) as a struggle over ‘common sense’. Whose common sense is invoked? How are transgender people excluded by it? But also, how does transgender politics challenge our common-sense understandings of gender?

Using ‘common sense’ as an analytical lens, it investigates parliamentary politics, activist campaigns, and artistic practices to show how transgender politics reshape how gender can be seen, heard, and understood in public life.

Some chemotherapies can damage skeletal muscle and the heart, leading to fatigue, reduced tolerance of cancer treatment, and even chronic heart failure. A potential underlying mechanism is mitochondrial dysfunction, affecting the energy factories of our cells. Preclinical studies suggest that exercise combined with a high-protein diet may attenuate or prevent this damage. This study investigates the effects of a combined exercise and nutritional intervention on chemotherapy-induced mitochondrial dysfunction in patients with lymphoma, using a unique, non-invasive technique: phosphorus magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

'Psalms ran through the very capillaries of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century society. With this research, I want to better understand how, in an age of religious polarisation, widely different groups of people could find grounding and strength in the same centuries-old songs.'

Life in the Low Countries between c. 1470 and 1566 was marked by rising religious and societal tension. In these turbulent times, people turned to the psalms. 

Singing the psalms in Dutch has often been regarded a protestant phenomenon. However, this project shows how both catholic and protestant people, as well as people who took an ambivalent stance towards the religious debates, used the psalms in their daily lives. Investigating traces of psalm use in manuscripts and printed books, this project by Renske Hoff reveals how people read, sang, and prayed the psalms when the world around them was rapidly changing.

Scientific studies often report clear answers, but those answers can depend on how the data are analyzed. Different reasonable analysis choices can lead to different results, even when researchers study the same question using the same data. This project examines how much these choices matter for variability in results compared to other differences, such as who is studied or how a study is designed. It also develops practical tools and communication strategies to help researchers better summarize and present analysis uncertainty, supporting more transparent and trustworthy science for both scientists and the public.

What do pedestrians in a busy train station, flocks of birds, and nutrient-seeking bacteria have in common? To a mathematician, quite a lot! All these examples can be described using interacting particle models, which capture how individuals avoid overcrowding, while tending to follow the group’s general movement. 

Interactive particle systems are highly complex. To make them tractable, they are commonly approximated by describing the collective behaviour of the system rather than tracking individual entities separately. This approximation is known as the mean-field limit. Classical mean-field theory, however, relies on restrictive assumptions, such as homogeneous behaviour across all particles. This project moves beyond these limitations by explicitly incorporating uncertainty and complex network structures into the analysis. The outcome is a mathematical toolbox for studying realistic interacting particle systems.

Clinical research is essential to ensure patients have access to high-quality healthcare. Many clinical drug trials encounter difficulties in recruiting a sufficient number of participants and are therefore terminated before the study is completed. Early termination of clinical trials results in insufficient evidence to inform decision making. This research will clarify which trial procedures – such as methods related to participant outreach, the format of the informed consent form, and flexible follow-up appointments – are key drivers of participation.

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is a major cause of pneumonia in infants worldwide. New prevention strategies protect infants using a single antibody, but the virus can change and escape this protection. This project examines whether combining several antibodies or designing one antibody that targets multiple parts of the virus can stop the virus from escaping. Researchers will study how RSV changes when exposed to antibodies and use this knowledge to design stronger, more resilient antibodies. The aim is long-lasting and affordable RSV prevention for every child.

How did philosophers in the premodern Islamic world think about non-human intelligence? Could animals, plants, celestial bodies, and angels know, communicate, and reason? This research focuses on these questions and on what the answers proposed by these authors meant for the idea of human uniqueness. These historical insights might help us enrich contemporary discussions about animal and plant intelligence.

What is intelligence? Why is it valued? Who or what can possess it? This project explores how thinkers in the premodern Islamic world discussed these questions long before contemporary debates on animal cognition and AI. Rather than restricting intelligence to humans, they ascribed capacities often associated with intelligence, like learning, problem-solving, emotions, and creativity to animals, plants, as well as angels and jinn. By bringing to light and analysing overlooked primary texts, Sarah De Mendonça Virgi’s project uncovers a rich conceptual landscape that can not only counter simplistic assumptions about human exceptionalism but also fuel debates on nonhuman intelligence today.

Physical, emotional or coercive partner violence, disproportionately affecting women, plays a role during and after parental separation. This raises major questions for family law, where shared parenting and continued contact is prioritised. In cases involving violence, a different approach may be required for the safety and well-being of children and parents. Significant concerns have been raised about the role of family law. This research therefore identifies problems in Dutch legal practice and seeks solutions in the Netherlands and abroad. Considering children’s and human rights, suitable legal solutions will be identified to do justice to separating families affected by partner violence. 

'Intimate partner violence, a form of domestic violence, is a significant problem. While many hope that it ends when partners separate, this is often not the case, especially when children are involved. In recent years, criticism has grown that Dutch family law pays insufficient attention to domestic violence. This grant allows me to conduct academic research into the role of domestic violence in complex divorce cases and to explore solutions in other jurisdictions and fields of law. It gives me the opportunity to build on my existing work into children's rights within family law. I hope the results will contribute, both academically and in practice, to concrete solutions in this field.'

Many patients undergo medical check-ups for years, even though there is often no proof that they are truly necessary. This project investigates when such check-ups can be safely reduced or stopped. Using a national program in which endoscopic surveillance for Barrett’s esophagus patients was discontinued, researchers will determine how much health risk is acceptable before restarting checks. By combining medical data, costs, and the preferences of patients and doctors, the project aims to provide clear guidelines for appropriate care.

Enteroviruses are important pathogens that can cause illnesses ranging from the common cold to severe neurological and heart diseases. Examples of enteroviruses include poliovirus, coxsackievirus and rhinovirus. Unfortunately, we know little about the viral big bang, an early phase of infection when the first viral RNA molecule that enters a cell begins to copy itself. 

In this project, Aswin Muralidharan will visualize these earliest stages of viral replication in living cells using cutting-edge technologies to. Understanding how early viral infections unfold may help us develop new antiviral drugs, which are eagerly awaited to treat infections by enteroviruses.

Many new medicines fail or cause serious side effects because current laboratory models cannot fully mimic how human organs work. The liver is especially important in drug safety testing, because it processes medicines and helps remove waste products from the body. One key process is the production and transport of bile, a fluid that supports detoxification and digestion and depends on close cooperation between different liver cell types.

Paulina Núñez Bernal will develop a new way to build human liver tissue using advanced 3D bioprinting. Instead of only printing cells into a predefined shape, she will introduce biological instructions into printed biomaterials. In the body, tissues are not formed by simply placing cells in the right position; cells are constantly guided by signals from their surroundings. BiLIVR aims to bring this layer of dynamic, biological instruction into 3D bioprinted liver models, helping them better mimic human tissue function for drug safety testing.

The long-term aim is to create more human-relevant models that help researchers better understand how medicines affect the liver and better predict the toxicity of drugs. This will reduce reliance on animal experiments.

Various microbes produce DNA-binding toxins. In this study, mini-guts (organoids) are exposed to these toxins to investigate whether they can cause DNA mutations. If this is the case, the researchers will determine how to recognize these mutations—they form a so-called ‘footprint’ in the DNA.
 
These ‘footprints’ will be used to determine whether mutations caused by microbial toxins are present in the DNA of normal intestinal cells and colorectal cancer cells. The presence or absence of this ‘footprint’ in key cancer genes can reveal whether such microbial toxins can cause colorectal cancer, offering insight into risk factors and potential prevention strategies.

MRI scanners are used to diagnose disease without harming the patient, but they often fail to spot disease in its early stages because of the fundamental building blocks of images: the pixel. These square building blocks are fundamentally at odds with the complex shapes of organs and tumors. This project establishes a new technique to build MRI images using artificial intelligence to learn new image building blocks that represent the human anatomy, consisting of complex shapes rather than square pixels. This will enable high-resolution MRI scans, ultimately improving the detection rate of early disease and improving treatment outcomes.

As humans, we often entertain thoughts about how things could be, mentally testing possible scenarios. From imagining whether a haircut would suit us to deciding where a new couch might look best, we use what we have recently seen and transform it in our mind to preview different outcomes. We do this many times a day, yet we still do not understand how the brain makes it possible. In this project, I will investigate how the mind turns the past into possible futures, and how these imagined futures can, in turn, shape what we remember.

Global health research increasingly aspires to be more inclusive, but what does inclusion look like in practice? This project explores how researchers in the Netherlands, South Africa and Uganda collaborate in pursuit of a future HIV cure. From a social science perspective, it examines the forms of collaboration and translation required to make research more inclusive, and the implications this has for research centres, infrastructures, and everyday scientific practices on both sides. By doing so, the project contributes to the development of HIV cure research that is more globally relevant and widely applicable.

'This project examines the role of sound in colonialism. Historians have long overlooked sound as a valuable source, even though sound is so closely interwoven with every aspect of life. My research aims to show that sound was not only an instrument of colonial power, but also of the of anticolonial resistance that refused to be silenced, right up to the present day. By truly listening, we can better understand both colonial and postcolonial societies.'

The research of Renée Vulto investigates the role of sound during Dutch colonialism in Suriname between 1667 and c. 1900. How did the Dutch attempt to regulate sound? And how did people resist this? Sound was an instrument of colonial power, yet despite systematic dehumanisation and active suppression, Indigenous peoples, enslaved people, and indentured labourers continued to speak their languages, practise their faiths, and make their music.

For the pre-technological period (up to c. 1900), Vulto searches for traces of colonial sound politics in historical texts, images, objects, and oral histories. She also collaborates with heritage communities in Suriname and the Netherlands to gain a deeper understanding of the significance of sonic heritage in contemporary postcolonial society.