Iris Verpaalen awarded Christine Mohrmann Stipend

Iris Verpaalen, PhD candidate at the Behaviour Change & Well-Being programme, has been awarded the Christine Mohrmann Stipend. Since 1990, the Executive Board of Radboud University has awarded the Christine Mohrmann Stipends to promising female PhD candidates. The objective of the grant is to encourage female researchers to stay in academia after completing their theses. Verpaalen is one of the two PhD candidates to receive this year’s Stipend on behalf of the Faculty of Social Sciences. Her PhD supervisors are Rob Holland, Simone Ritter and Madelon van Hooff.

Verpaalen studies how people deal with innovations. Innovations offer solutions in a changing world, but also raise resistance. Verpaalen investigates how this resistance develops in reaction to social pressure to change in combination with the uncertainty inherent to doing something new. She will use the Mohrmann Stipend for a work visit to prof. Eva Jonas’ lab at Salzburg University, where she will collaborate with social cognition experts to investigate how people mutually influence each other’s reaction to change.