RYA interdisciplinarity
The RYA promotes interdisciplinary collaboration between its members and with others, and creates opportunities for its members to establish themselves as new leaders in their discipline.
RYA Cross-Faculty Catapult Grants
One of the aims of the Radboud Young Academy (RYA) is to unlock the huge potential of interdisciplinary research and to increase interdisciplinary and cross-faculty collaborations within the Radboud University and Radboudumc. Since fruitful partnerships across disciplines, fields of study and faculties often start with relatively small initiatives or modest exchanges, the RYA presents the annual RYA Cross-Faculty Catapult Grants: 2 grants of € 5K each for a 1-year interdisciplinary initiative. With this grant, RYA wants to provide an incentive for academics to initiate a collaborative initiative across the borders of their own faculty or institute.
In the beginning of 2024 we organised the first round of this grant. We received 16 very promising and innovative proposals. The four members of our selection committee each made a top-5 ranking. From all ranked proposals a lottery selected these two that will receive the grant:
- Juliette Alenda-Demoutiez (Nijmegen School of Management) and Karolien van Teijlingen (Faculty of Social Sciences) wrote a proposal about degrowth and challenges faced by small-scale, bottom-up initiatives when they try to scale up.
- Marieke de Vries (Faculty of Sciences), Pim Haselager (Faculty of Social Sciences/Donders Institute), Hanna Schraffenberger (Faculty of Sciences/iHub), Simon Fisher (Donders Institute) and Marene Dimmendaal (Faculty of Sciences) wrote a proposal about improving decision-making in the healthcare system by ‘Self Reflection Machines’.
Serendipity Sessions
To stimulate interdisciplinarity RYA will regularly organises Serendipity Sessions about topics that could be viewed from different prospectives and scientific disciplines. On Monday 30 October the first session was organized. During this session coffee was explored from different scientific views.
On 14 March 2024 a special InScience Serendipity Session was oganized. Theme of this session was Darkness. After the film Strangers in the Dark, Richard van Wezel (Professor in Visual Neuroscience), Janna Vrijsen (assistant professor in behavioral science) and László Munteán (assistant professor of Cultural Studies and American Studies) talked about this topic from their own scientific perspective.
Book club
Some members join the RYA book club. During these regular discussions general scientific books are discussed from several prospectives. Topic of the first session was Unflattening, a graphic thesis written by Nick Sousanis. Other books of interest are: Life of Lines written by Tim Ingold and White Innocence written by Gloria Wekker.
