Winners of Radboud Young Academy cross-faculty catapult grants 2026!

We are proud to announce the winners of Radboud Young Academy cross-faculty catapult grants 2026! With this €5K grant for a 1‑year initiative, Radboud Young Academy aims to unlock the huge potential of interdisciplinary research and to increase cross-faculty interdisciplinary collaborations within Radboud University and Radboudumc.
We received 23 applications, of which 17 fulfilled all requirements and entered our lottery. From these 17 applications, two winning applications were selected through the lottery:

Max Sterling (Radboudumc) and Ioan Gabriel Bucur (Faculty of Science) will launch a new collaboration that links experimental neurobiology with artificial intelligence and data science to improve automatic detection of synaptic events by synaptic event-detection models.

Merel van Goch (Faculteit der Letteren), Esther Steenbeek-Planting (Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen) and Yayun Zhang (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) will develop a “Critical Words” matrix and theoretical report to personalize children’s reading experiences in the Letterprins game, aiming to boost children's reading absorption through interdisciplinary insights from the humanities and social sciences.

The grant winners will present their results during one of our Serendipity Sessions next year.