Contestants Breaking Science 2024
A total of 29 candidates were taking part in Breaking Science 2024, all doing research at different faculties of Utrecht University.
Finalists
Rosa de Boer
Rosa is a PhD candidate at the paleomagnetic laboratory of the department of Earth Sciences at Utrecht University. She works on a new method to deduct information on the earth’s magnetic field from volcanic rocks. Before coming to Utrecht, Rosa studied geology at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and at the University of Oslo.
Eline de Groot
Eline just finished her PhD. She is currently working as a postdoc for the Early Childhood community of the strategic theme Dynamics of Youth. This means she is spending half of her time doing interdisciplinary research into early development (mainly focusing on the topics of sleep, language and brain development) and half of her time building a multi-disciplinary community of researchers studying Early Childhood.
Gijs Teunis
Gijs is a second-year PhD student at the RIVM and the UMC Utrecht doing research into the spread of antimicrobial resistance genes in the Netherlands. He is using bioinformatics tools and pipelines to study resistant bacteria collected and sequences by the RIVM in the past 10 years.
Lin Rietveld
Lin graduated from the Bachelor's program College of Pharmaceutical sciences and thereafter the Master's program Drug Innovation at Utrecht University. She focused mostly on organic chemistry with some interests in mass spectrometry and genetic reprogramming. Currently she is a PhD candidate at the Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery department where she combines all her fields of interests to study RNA: a biological macromolecule essential for the regulation of cellular processes in all known life forms.
Thomas Brand
Thomas grew up in Italy, where he studied Pharmaceutical Biotechnology at the University of Bologna. After living in the UK for almost a year, he moved to the Netherlands in 2019, to start his PhD at the University of Utrecht.
Joyce Pang
Joyce is a PhD candidate in the Sociology department at Utrecht University. Originally from Hong Kong, she completed a bachelor's and research master's in social psychology at the University of Amsterdam. She has a strong interest in sustainability research, particularly in understanding the intersection of individual motivations and broader sociocultural structures in addressing environmental challenges.
Wouter de Rijk
Wouter is a PhD candidate at Utrecht University School of Governance researching Climate Change and Institutions for Social Imagination. He researches the role of social imagination and futuring practices from the perspective of Critical Public Administration. His previous studies were in Political History and Political Science at Leiden University.
Giulia Perticari
Giulia comes from a lovely village in the center of Italy, nestled between the countryside and the sea. After her bachelor in Padova and master’s in biotechnology in Trento, she became intrigued by tumor biology. This led her to pursue a PhD in molecular oncology in Utrecht, where she studies rare childhood tumors using patient-derived organoids at the Princess Maxima Centre.
Contestants
Jonathan Arentoft
Jonathan is a PhD candidate at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development in just transitions of crop gene editing for smallholders in the global South. He has an interdisciplinary background ranging from International Relations and Economics to agroecology and plant breeding, allowing him to oscillate between the technical and political elements of a research topic.
Esther van den Bergh
Esther graduated as a molecular biologist and is now doing a PhD in the Translational Plant Biology group. Here she researches the molecular mechanisms of bolting in lettuce. Next to her PhD, she is a teacher in biotechnology.
Evelien Birza
After her MSc in veterinary medicine, Evelien started her PhD in the experimental cardiology group at the UMCU. In her PhD, she is mainly focused on in vivo testing of novel cell and gene therapies to treat cardiac diseases.
Amber Boot
Amber recently finished her PhD at the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht (IMAU) within the Physics Department and is currently working there as a postdoc. In her research she looks at the mechanisms of abrupt ocean circulation changes and its impact on climate, ocean biogeochemistry and marine ecosystems.
Jelle van den Bor
Jelle is a researcher at Utrecht University. During his PhD, he specialised in human organotypic in vitro models for lung regeneration. Now, he studies inter-organ communication by extracellular vesicles using in vivo zebrafish models.
Aimee du Chatinier
Aimee is a biomedical PhD student specializing in translational pediatric neuro-oncology, nearing completion of her third year at the Princess Maxima Center. Her primary focus involves establishing in vivo models for pediatric brain tumors and assessing various therapeutic strategies within these models.
Sheng Fu
Sheng is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Geosciences. He works in the natural hazard related research. His work is mainly to detect when the landslide happened in the past and how fast the landslide moved in the past using remote sensing technology.
Susanne Jelsma
Susanne is a technical physician and first year PhD candidate who got intrigued by the brain and especially how the brain communicates within itself. With her creativity and persistence she aims to improve the prospects of people with epilepsy. She looks forward to learn how to bring here enthusiasm to the broader public!
Rianne Kluck
Rianne is a PhD-candidate in studying exodermis development and evolution. Like people, plants also put up barriers to protect themselves. She wants to understand how they do this and look at this also through the scope of evolution.
Luc Krimpenfort
The past 3 years Luc researched the development of blood vessels in the eye at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm as part of his masters project (that got out of hand a little). He came back to the Netherlands to start his PhD to study how lymph nodes train the antibody producing cells that allow most people to acquire immunity to almost any pathogen.
Cedric Lau
All patients deserve to get the appropriate drug in the right dose. However, this may currently not be the case for patients who receive weight-reducing surgery. As a hospital pharmacist, Cedric is striving to optimize recommendations for the choice and dose of drugs for patients with weight-reducing surgery.
Mariia Maksimova
Mariia, an ethics PhD at UMC Utrecht, maps the ethical issues of ultra-rare disease therapies. Her journey is to show that ethics in research isn't a rare find, unlike the diseases she studies. Morality, it turns out, does give one a compass.
Mandy Muller
After completing the master’s degree in Sociology and Social Research at Utrecht University, Mandy is now a first-year PhD student in Social Psychology. Her research interests include understanding the mysterious world of human behavior, how to change it, and individual moral values and responsibility.
Rosalie Neijzen
While working as a medical doctor, Rosalie noticed how variations in clinical practice due to knowledge gaps can lead to inequality between patients. As a PhD student, she now addresses one of these knowledge gaps herself. By focusing on improving epilepsy diagnostics for first seizure patients, her purpose is to ensure harmonious and more evidence-based clinical practice.
Oriol Pomarol Moya
Oriol comes from Barcelona, where he studied Physics and worked briefly in education. After that, he decided to return to academia, this time in Utrecht. First as a MSc in Applied Data Science and later as a PhD student at the Geosciences Faculty, where he currently works.
Pedro Santoro Zambon
Pedro is a postdoc researcher at Utrecht University leading a project under a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoc Fellowship Action. This fellowship aims to decode the intricate science of team collaboration, offering a methodology and an algorithmic matchmaking system for game developers. Pedro is also a consultant and project manager for the games industry. He researches tools, methods, and solutions to support game creators.
Jannieke Simons
Jannieke has a BSc in Nanobiology and MA in Applied Ethics, which should make her particular interest in the ethics of biotechnological and biomedical innovations come as no surprise. Her PhD research at the UMC Utrecht, department of Bioethics & Health Humanities, investigates the ethical dimensions of human somatic prime editing therapy for inherited cardiomyopathies.
Adriaan Walpot
Adriaan's joy and ambitions as a teacher has sent him in evermore pursuit of improving students' learning. To this end, his PhD project allows students and teachers to collaborate and transform their shared daily activity. Empowering them to enact educational change that is meaningful and beneficial.
Hope Williard
Hope is a postdoctoral researcher on the NWO-Vidi project 'Lettercraft and Epistolary Performance in Early Medieval Europe’, where she contributes to the design of the project database and researches the surprisingly wide range of people involved in letter exchange.
Linus Wollenweber
During his studies in Molecular Biotechnology in Munich, Linus was especially interested into immunological research and the more technical field of mass spectrometry. His PhD position in Albert Hecks group for Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics allowed him to combine these two interests. He develops new methods to gain novel insights into previously hidden human antibody immune responses.
Pascale van Zantvliet
Pascale is a post-doctoral researcher at the department of Education & Pedagogy. She is also facilitator of the Youth Education & Life Skills community of Dynamics of Youth. She studied and obtained her PhD in Sociology and taught for some years. She is fascinated by differences between people and how people (learn to) deal with these.