Events

The Social Educational Neuroscience Amsterdam (SENSA) research team, including GUTS researcher Lydia Krabbendam, has won the first edition of the “Ammodo Science Award for groundbreaking research” in the Social Sciences domain!

The SENSA team conducts research into social cohesion within society: how do you promote and maintain social cohesion in a society where individualism and discrimination seem to be increasing ? With the help of research into the functioning of the brain in children and adolescents, the research team tries to answer this question and gain more insight into social processes. With the research results, the researchers hope to be able to have a social impact and offer opportunities for applications in practice, in particular in education.

Do you want to know more about SENSA and the social setting research? Visit their own website or read more about the winners on the website of the Ammodo Science Award.

On Tuesday, March 10, 2020, the Start Impulse of NeurolabNL, in collaboration with the Start Impulse of NWA route Youth in Development, Education and Education, organizes the symposium “Join forces for youth” in the Utrecht House in Utrecht. It has been two years since the kick-off and 9 research projects have now been started through which the routes attempt to map the position of adolescents in our society. NeuroLabNL does this in four research projects that focus on “Optimal conditions for learning and safety of young people” and within the Youth route five research projects are conducted on “Equal opportunities for a diverse youth”. During the meeting we put everything together: what have we learned in the collaboration between science and society so far?

Exchange within the routes is central to the morning program. The afternoon is reserved for various external speakers, including philosopher and writer Bas Haring, Anneke Hendriks, project manager of the Dopper Foundation and expert in the field of youth participation and sustainability, and students from vocational education Landstede.

The symposium will be in Dutch. For the full program and registration options, see here.

Matteo Giletta from the University of Tilburg - GUTS member and researcher on the NeuroLabNL Start impulse - has received a prestigious ERC Starting Grant of 1.5 million euros for his research project ‘Outside-in: How Bullying in Adolescence Gets Into The Mind and Under the Skin’. In this research, he aims to uncover the mechanisms underlying the negative consequences of bullying victimization. To do so, he examines how bullying exposure can influence adolescents’ psychological and physiological functioning in real-time in their real-life. Moreover, he explores the possibility that bullying influences gene expression resulting in a profile that increases risk for health problems. These processes are investigated using a multi-method approach that integrates a variety of diverse methodologies, including ambulatory assessments of psychological and physiological data, genome-wide transcriptional profiling, and a longitudinal discordant monozygotic (MZ) twin-design. Together, this research will offer unprecedented insights about short- and long-term interplays between psychological, physiological and molecular processes through which bullying may get into the mind and under the skin.

This conference brings together leading scientists from a range of disciplines to unravel the complex connections between genome, brain structure and function, and cognitive processes relevant to e.g. language, memory, and psychiatric disorders. An overview of the keynote talks can be found online: please visit www.cognomics.nl​ for additional information about the program, registration and abstract submission.

Prof. Dr. Berna Güroĝlu, project leader in the NeuroLabNL Startimpuls delivered her inaugural lecture on 28 June in the Academy Building of Leiden University. She has been appointed professor of Neuroscience of Social Relations. In her inaugural lecture, she spoke about the development and influence of friendship during adolescence, and the impact of social exclusion on brain development. Her inaugural lecture took place together with the inaugural lecture of Prof. dr. Ellen de Bruijn, professor of Neurocognitive Clinical Psychology at Leiden University. Read this article for the scientific content of their lectures. Congratulations Berna and Ellen with your professorships!