Donders Awards

The Donders Cube was awarded to Léa Michel in recognition of her exceptional contributions to sustainability and community-driven change within the institute. Together with Ana Carolina Temporão, who is no longer affiliated with the Donders Institute she has acted as a driving force behind the MNS Green Team. They established initiatives to monitor and reduce the carbon footprint of research, including travel tracking and the integration of carbon monitoring tools on the HPC system. Their work has raised awareness while offering practical solutions for more responsible research practices. Léa emphasised that these achievements are the result of a collective effort of all the Green Team members and the MNS department that supports their work.

For her hard work and commitment for the festival Kletskoppen/Kletsheads. The evaluation committee noted that Sharon’s efforts bring an appealing message to the public, while involving many Donderians across centers. In recent years, Kletskoppen has proven to be very successful and has grown into a professional concept. As such, it includes a successful example of citizen science. 

For their work in setting up the new Human Neuroscience programme. Their commitment and dedication to realise this innovative programme was seen by the committee as a tremendous asset to the institute. Moreover, getting the support of so many teachers, managers, directors and more, within the Donders Institute and various faculties of Radboud University, to obtain all the necessary accreditations is a huge task.

For her pro-active approach and going beyond the call of duty in her role of lab manager and data officer at DCC, where she has set an example of good support for Donders researchers and contributed to making research at Donders more sustainable for the future.

For their coordinated effort in bringing together local and international researchers to raise awareness about the continued need for work with animal models, and the long-term ideal goal of replacing them by validated alternatives.

For their work in creating an open and inclusive environment within the Donders community by, among other things, organizing first Donders Diversity and Inclusion Survey, Donders Diversity webinars, and Donders Inclusion Seminar Series.

For her work as the coordinator of the Donders Graduate School, where she introduced positive program changes and showed significant care for the welfare of PhD candidates.

For their development of an open-source software toolbox for MEG, EEG and iEEG analysis, facilitating and supporting the efforts of researchers across the Donders Institute.

For the active engagement of their study association within the Cognitive Neurosience Master’s course, where they contributed to the integration of the course with the rest of the Donders Institute through various working groups, committees, and peer coaching.

For their creation of the Donders Repository, an RDM tool facilitating safe storage and long-term internal accessibility of research data, thus making Donderians' research data as FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) as possible.