Since 1990, the Executive Board of Radboud University has awarded the Christine Mohrmann Stipends (until 2015: Frye stipends) annually to promising women PhD candidates. The eleven laureates of 2023 are: Alicia Castro, Carmen Schleijpen, Emmie Hoebens, Klara Raiber, Nelleke Brouwer, Nina de Boer, Michelle Jansen, Sofía Forchieri, Sabine Schootemeijer, Sara Arts and Xinyue Li.
Christine Mohrmann Stipend for eleven women PhD candidates
Eleven women PhD candidates from Radboud University received a Christine Mohrmann Stipend on Tuesday 28 March. The aim of the stipend is to encourage PhD candidates to continue their academic careers after the completion of their thesis. The stipend worth 5000 euros gives them the opportunity, for example, to spend a period at a university abroad or to deepen their research in another way.
Alicia Castro – Faculty of Science
Alicia Castro aims to understand the properties of space and time and how they behave in extreme conditions, for example, in the center of black holes or at the beginning of the universe. She uses new and innovative mathematical tools, called random geometries, to explore this topic. By studying simplified models of space and time in 2 and 3 dimensions, she hopes to uncover important insights into our universe, which is 4-dimensional. With the stipend, she will travel to various research groups in California, where she will present her research and forge new and existing collaborations with other scientists.
Carmen Schleijpen – Faculty of Law
Carmen Schleijpen conducts research on the civil liability of arbitrators under current Dutch law. Arbitration is a form of alternative dispute resolution (ADR). In her research, Carmen focuses on liability of arbitrators towards the parties to an arbitration for errors in the exercise of their (adjudicatory) task. She highlights several legal issues and questions that may arise in this context. Carmen wishes to allocate the grant for a stay in Paris, in the context of the comparative part of her research and to deepen her knowledge on the subject of the PhD research.
Emmie Hoebens – Faculty of Arts
Emmie Hoebens conducts sociolinguistic research in a Mennonite Old Colony settlement in the South of Mexico. In the 16th century, Baptist followers of the Frisian ex-priest Menno Simons fled from the Netherlands and arrived in Mexico almost four centuries later (1922). What is the role of Plautdietsch in the survival of the religious way of life of this community? Based on Hymes’ Ethnography of Speaking Emmie aims to contribute to the understanding of the social functioning of a heritage language in interaction with religion and education. The stipend will be used to promote more insight into these communities, in collaboration with some research institutes in Mexico.
Klara Raiber – Faculty of Social Sciences
Klara Raiber researches the employment consequences of caregiving for family and friends with health issues, for instance, if caregiving has consequences for hourly wages, working hours, or job satisfaction. She bases her analyses on newly collected caregiving data, longitudinal surveys, and register data. Klara would like to spend the stipend on short videos about her findings to increase the outreach of her research and for a short visit to Oxford to work with Charles Rahal on machine learning approaches for caregiving research.
Nelleke Brouwer – Faculty of Medical Sciences
Nelleke Brouwer focusses on tumor deposits in colorectal cancer, clusters of tumor cells found in the fat surrounding the bowel. Her studies try to elucidate the role of tumor deposits in the spread of colorectal cancer by analyzing their biology. Furthermore, she translates the biological findings to the clinical level by investigating the appearance of tumor deposits on medical imaging, and by combining patient outcomes with tissue analyses using artificial intelligence. Nelleke will use the stipend for further personal development with regards to research methods and evidence based leadership at the university of Oxford.
Nina de Boer – Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies
Nina de Boer conducts research into the added value of conceptualizing and studying psychological problems as multidimensional networks, i.e. stable sets of interacting biological, psychological, social and existential factors instead of focusing on one (neurobiological) cause. Nina wants to use the stipend to study the interfaces between her research and issues surrounding neurodiversity. For this she will spend time at the University of Exeter, visit a congress at the Pompeau Fabra University in Barcelona and gain more experience in conducting qualitative interviews on philosophical themes.
Michelle Jansen – Faculty of Social Sciences
Michelle Jansen investigates the complex dynamics between factors that explain interindividual differences in cognitive functioning in normal and pathological ageing (for example, due to Alzheimer’s disease). She also investigates how we can utilize this knowledge to optimize the effectiveness of interventions aimed at preventing cognitive decline. With the stipend, Michelle hopes to further bridge the gap between research and neuropsychological practice by visiting the state-of-the-art Oxford Brain Health Centre (University of Oxford) and several memory clinics in the Netherlands.
Sofía Forchieri – Faculty of Arts
Sofía Forchieri researches how contemporary Latin American women writers are imagining and remembering feminicide, the killing of women because of their gender. The aim of her PhD project is to show how, by experimenting with unusual narrative frameworks and emotions, these writers open up new ways of understanding and remembering gender violence. With the stipend, Sofía plans to visit the Center for Memory Studies in Buenos Aires and the Alberto Hurtado University in Santiago de Chile to collaborate with researchers working on cultural memory and gender studies.
Sabine Schootemeijer – Faculty of Medical Sciences
Sabine Schootemeijer investigates the effect of physical activity in people with Parkinson’s disease. She developed an app that stimulates people with Parkinson’s disease to become more physically active. Currently, she is evaluating the effectiveness of this app in a large (N=452) randomized controlled trial. Sabine will leverage the stipendium to visit her collaborators in Boston. This allows her to work on her statistical analyses and improve her analytical skills. Moreover, she will visit several research groups with complementary expertise.
Sara Arts – Nijmegen School of Management
Sara Arts investigates decision-making processes of individuals when they face different types of complex decisions. In life, there are many occasions when people may not be completely certain about their decisions. This can be due to the complexity of the decision situation, or the difficulty with evaluating the choice options. In her research she combines various data sources, including self-collected experimental data, panel data, and administrative data from Statistics Netherlands (CBS). Sara will use the stipend to visit Birmingham University, where she will present and discuss her research projects.
Xinyue Li - Faculty of Science
Xinyue Li Xinyue Li studies thermosalient materials that exhibit major shape deformations during heating, making them great candidates for actuators, sensors and energy transduction devices. Xinyue tries to unravel the mechanism of this phase transition by ultrafast optical techniques with picosecond time resolution. The stipendium will be used to visit the Raman Lab in Coimbra and the XFEL facility in Hamburg, to conduct detailed investigations that are complementary to the thesis research to discover the underlying microscopic mechanism of this fascinating phenomenon.