Radboud Science Awards 2024 go to research into slave registers, black holes, and stress

Stories from the slave registers

Until recently, our history of slavery has been described mainly by researchers with a Western perspective. To change this, Coen van Galen has collaborated with historians, archivists and citizens from Suriname, the Antilles, and the Netherlands. The aim of this collaboration is to make all population archives of Suriname and the Antilles accessible online. This creates the opportunity to explore the perspective of the people who were enslaved. For descendants, this enables an opportunity to tell the story of their ancestors from their own perspective. All this has played a major role in bringing about of a plethora of books, plays, podcasts and television series in which people seek to connect with their colonial past. In 2023, the slave register databases of Suriname and Curaçao have even been declared a World Heritage Site. 

During the classroom visit, students will go on a scavenger hunt through various sources (such as newspaper articles, runaway advertisements, police reports, and slave registers) to discover as much as possible about the lives of enslaved people. In this way, the students reconstruct the stories of individuals in slavery themselves and become acquainted with the unimaginable conditions in which they had to live. Along the way, students also learn to be critical of sources. Because although they will be searching for perspective of enslaved people, many sources come from the people and institutions that perpetuated slavery.

This project is offered to schools in the form of a lesson plan and a class visit.

The music of black holes

Béatrice Bonga conducts groundbreaking research into black holes. Black holes are extremely difficult to study because they attract everything in the environment, including light. As such, it is impossible to directly observe them. In order to investigate black holes, scientists measure how they affect their environment: how black holes change the movement of stars, how they 'eat' stars, and how the light around them behaves. When two black holes merge, gravitational waves are emitted in the process. Béatrice Bonga makes an important contribution to the study of these waves. The beauty of gravitational waves is that they are characterized by complex frequencies (known as quasinormal modes or QNMs), which are somewhat similar to the tones of musical instruments. These frequencies can be measured on Earth and form an important basis for black hole research. 

Students will play an active role in the class project, during which they will be introduced to black hole research. In a variety of ways, they will be able to explore both gravity and objects they can't directly observe. In parallel with the study of black holes, the students will determine which (non-visible) object they are observing based on its frequency (pitch). With the help of photography, they will also indirectly observe objects, through their shadows.

Stress detectives

Stress is a major social problem. Too much stress can lead to illnesses, especially when it’s long-term. But what’s stressful and at what stage stress really becomes problematic, varies from person to person. It’s therefore important to investigate what stress is. Erno Hermans studies how the brain can adapt to stress factors. His research focuses on the acute effects of stress on cognition, memory, and adaptability, as well as the consequences of exposure to long-term stress during development. The detection of stress and the promotion of resilience are central to his research. Developing new treatments and prevention of stress-related diseases are the ultimate goals in this research. The use of wearable devices linked to smartphones, enabling people to monitor their own mental health (in the future), plays an important role in this. 

Erno Hermans has invited a few primary school classes to visit the Donders Institute at the Radboud University. There, students will be given a demonstration of a brain scan. Using an MRI scanner, stress in the brain is made visible in real time. Students will also investigate stress reactions themselves. Among other things, they will use the aforementioned wearables to measure physical stress responses such as heart rate and skin conductance (the extent to which the skin can conduct electricity, through sweating).