Shari Boodts receives KNAW Early Career Award

Historian Shari Boodts will receive a KNAW Early Career Award. The prize, 15,000 euros and a work of art, is intended for researchers in the Netherlands who are at the start of their careers and who have innovative, original research ideas.

Boodts (1986) is a senior researcher at the RICH research institute. The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) describes her research method as entrepreneurial and original. ‘Her research into the sermons of Church Fathers from the Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages is unprecedented. Boodts set up her own research group and combines eras that are normally studied separately. Moreover, she knows how to make scientific knowledge attractive to a wide international audience. Her articles can be read on Medievalists.net, which has more than 250,000 followers.’

A total of twelve young researchers will receive the award, three from each of the four academic fields of the KNAW. The KNAW Early Career Award will be awarded for the second time this year. The winners come from the full spectrum of science. They conduct research into, for example, whistleblowing in the European Union, the influence of maternal stress (due to, among others, Covid-19) on the development of children, the difference in the rate of brain degradation in different population groups, vibrating socks for Parkinson's patients, the effect of black holes and (de) colonization on the basis of sound recordings from Southeast Asia.