Growing up in Science Series: Sabine Hunnius

Please join us for the last Growing Up in Science event of the academic year! To celebrate summer, we are delighted to have Sabine Hunnius in the interview chair. Come join us in the Red Room to hear about Sabine’s interesting journey, past and present. Here are the specs:

Who: Prof. Sabine Hunnius (Director of the DCC Baby and Child Research center, professor of developmental cognitive neuroscience)
When: Thursday June 30, 16:00-17.00h
Where: Red Room, Trigon building

As a teaser trailer, here’s the “official” story of Sabine’s career:

Sabine received her degree in Psychology from the Free University of Berlin in 1998, and completed her PhD at the University of Groningen in 2005. She travelled around working in Tilburg and Uppsala (Sweden). Having landed a tenured assistant professorship that offered little opportunity to do the research she was interested in, she decided to go back to being a postdoc which brought her to Donders. This decision paid off, as she now heads the Baby & Child Research Center, and she was appointed the first female full professor at DCC in 2018.

Sabine is an absolute pioneer in researching infant cognition. She was among the first to implement eyetracking and EEG with infants, proving wrong everyone who had been saying that this is impossible. She is now taking on the next challenge, developing babysuits for motion-tracking. She has been awarded too many grants to mention, including a Vici grant and several highly competitive Marie Curie Innovative Training Network grants (and applied for many more grants that were rejected!). In addition to being a great scientist, Sabine is a great mentor (in 2015 she was a finalist in the ‘Netherlands best PhD supervisor of the year’), a great proponent of Open Science, and an excellent science communicator. She recently published the very well-received book ‘Het babybrein: Wat iedereen moet weten over de hersenontwikkeling van baby's’ and is currently co-developing a circus show for babies!

Curious what things are like behind the scenes for someone with such a successful scientific career? What it is like to build a scientific career as a rather quiet, down-to-earth, (self-)critical person? How Sabine decided to forego the security of tenure to go back to being a postdoc? What keeps her up at night, what have been the struggles, the frustrations, and the joys?

Please join us so you can find out for yourself!

As always, you are very welcome (and encouraged!) to ask questions during the event, but if you feel a little shy you can also send questions in advance to either of us. We can then ask them for you during the discussion.

Looking forward to seeing you in person!

Hanneke & Alan