The Starting Grant is a personal grant of approximately €1.5 million. It provides talented researchers with five years of support for their research.

The awards:

Johana Kotišová (Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture): Emotions and bodies in fact-based media production: Integrating affective and embodied knowledge into journalism and documentary filmmaking (AFfact)

Fact-based media production, such as journalism and documentary-making, traditionally emphasise objectivity and rationality, often sidelining subjectivity, emotions and bodily experiences. While media studies have recently begun to focus more on emotions and bodily sensations in media production, content and consumption, there remains a need to understand the importance of emotions and embodiment in shaping what media professionals know. The traditional prioritisation of rationality over emotion has fostered a professional culture that suppresses feelings, making it difficult for media industries to address critical challenges such as the mental well-being of media professionals and the disconnect between media and their audiences. Kotišová’s project aims to integrate emotions, as embodied knowledge, into fact-based media production on empirical, theoretical and practical levels. It involves ethnographic research among journalists and documentary-makers covering politics, conflict and culture across six Central and Eastern European countries. Based on the fieldwork, Kotišová will develop theories around ‘affective epistemology’. She will also explore the practical integration of emotions into fact-based media production through a series of nature retreats for media professionals. These retreats will test how nature-based therapy can improve emotional literacy and mental well-being, helping to embed emotions and bodily experiences in media production.

Milica Nikolic (Research Institute Child Development and Education): The emergence of distinct emotions in human development (EMODEV)

People experience a wide range of emotions, from awe and excitement to disappointment and envy. These emotions motivate our behaviour, guide our decisions, and help us navigate the social and physical world. Yet, we still know very little about when, how, and why these emotions emerge in childhood. In her project, Nikolic will study the emergence of twelve distinct emotions: interest, excitement, awe, feeling moved, schadenfreude, elevation, confusion, worry, disappointment, envy, resentment, and indignation, in babies and young children. She will investigate when these emotions first appear, how they are expressed in the face and body, what kinds of behaviours they drive, and how they are shaped by family, culture, and biological maturation. By combining different approaches – from qualitative methods and natural observation to experimental, longitudinal, and cross-cultural studies – Nikolic will provide the first systematic investigation of the emergence of a wide range of emotions in early development. This will revolutionize our understanding of the nature of emotions and the motivations behind young children’s behaviours.

Sebastian Pfeilmeier (Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences): Cell Type-Specific Disease Resistance Against Vascular Xanthomonas Plant Pathogens (XANTHORESIST)

Plants have fascinating ways to protect themselves from harmful germs. They use physical barriers to keep invaders out and an immune system to fight off infections. But germs have their own tricks to get inside plants and cause disease. For example, specialised bacteria from the genus Xanthomonas enter the leaf through tiny water pores and infect the vascular system, leading to Black Rot disease in cabbage crops, which is devastating agricultural fields in the Netherlands and around the globe. Stopping germs at the water pores could prevent a systemic infection. As we currently know very little about how plants defend this entry point, Pfeilmeier’s project aims to identify the defence responses in the plant cells that first perceive and fight the harmful invaders. In addition to the immune system, helpful microbes that live inside these water pores may protect the plant. Understanding how the plant reacts to germs and helpful microbes will enable us to find new ways to protect crops from diseases. Pfeilmeier’s findings can help safeguard not only cabbage, but also other crops, including wheat and rice, that suffer from similar diseases.

Ziggy Pleunis (Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy): Unraveling the nature of fast radio bursts through a multifaceted look at their local environments (EnviroFlash)

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) originate far beyond our Milky Way and were only recently discovered. It is still a mystery where and how these bursts are produced, but it is clear that some sources repeat while others apparently do not. The key to understanding the variety of FRBs lies in their local environments. In his project, Pleunis will capitalise on the ‘Outriggers’ upgrade to the CHIME telescope, which has transformed the world’s best FRB detector into a machine that can now also pinpoint the bursts to their galactic neighbourhoods. With the much better localised sources and associated redshift (distance) measurements from Outriggers, it is possible to infer the density and magnetisation of the FRB neighbourhood from the radio signals, and to place this in context with information gleaned from optical images. Using low-frequency observations with the LOFAR telescope – which is also undergoing an upgrade that will make it a far better FRB detector than before – any variations in the local environments of nearby repeating sources will be precisely monitored to anchor detailed FRB models. In addition to directly addressing open questions about FRBs, Pleunis’ project will establish FRBs as much more sensitive and precise probes of the density and magnetisation of the Universe at large.

Gulnaz Sibgatullina (Amsterdam School for Regional, Transnational and European Studies): Illiberal Religious Internationalism in Africa (IRInA)

In her project, Sibgatullina investigates how global powers employ transnational interfaith networks as a key instrument of soft power in Africa. These networks – linking religious institutions, actors and discourses across borders – play an increasingly strategic role in reshaping international alliances, particularly in postcolonial contexts where liberal norms are contested. Despite the growing prominence of such religious diplomacy, its role in building international influence remains significantly underexplored. Sibgatullina examines how transnational Christian and Islamic institutions in East Africa participate in efforts to challenge dominant ideological paradigms. She identifies three domains where these challenges are most visible: secularism, cultural liberalism and Western-centric knowledge systems. The analysis is grounded in local dynamics and examines the actors, discourses and strategies through which interfaith soft power projects are advanced or resisted. At its core, the project offers a novel theoretical framework centred on the concepts of cultural solidarity and the recognition of conservative identities. This lens enables a deeper understanding of how moral and civilisational affinities are mobilised to forge new political imaginaries that transcend traditional geopolitical divides.

Giacomo Tagiuri (Amsterdam Centre for European Law and Governance): The Governance of Loss in the EU (GovLoss-EU)

Tagiuri seeks to explore how law and regulation can govern loss in economic transformations. We live in an age of intense and rapidly emerging loss linked to globalization, technological change, and climate change. These processes displace market and production arrangements, thus creating losers: workers, businesses, and consumers whose livelihoods depend on the displaced arrangements. Think of small shops that suffer in the face of digital commerce, fishermen who lose their traditional catch as a result of climate change, and autoworkers losing their jobs to machines. Being a loser in this sense typically entails not only loss of income and livelihood, but also loss of prestige, social ties and community. Addressing this loss is urgent for both strategic reasons - for example, losers of economic transformation are documented to embrace regressive politics - and more normative ones - for example linked to the injustice of ignoring the suffering loss creates. There is, however, still a poverty in the law when it comes to concepts and vision with which to describe what being losers entails, and how law should respond. To fill this gap, Tagiuri will develop a theory of the Governance of Loss, which offers a typology of strategies, regulatory techniques, and social desiderata to assist losers. Using socio-legal methods, Tagiuri and 3 PhDs will then analyse how different strategies operate on the ground in three economic sectors: agriculture and fisheries, the automotive industry, and consumer services. 

Amit Zac (Amsterdam Center for Law & Economics): Lex Imperfecta: Leveraging (Un)supervised Machine-Learning Tools for Optimizing Digital Markets Regulations (Lex-Luthor)

Recent empirical work using computational tools has uncovered widespread non-compliance with laws such as the EU GDPR and consumer protection rules. This pattern is driven, in part, by outdated enforcement mechanisms and the absence of effective tools for detecting violations. In a digital society, such systemic non-compliance imposes real societal costs. In this project, Zac addresses the challenge of reassessing deterrence theory and regulatory effectiveness in this context. He will first develop and deploy computational tools to collect time-series data on compliance with privacy, consumer, and competition laws across EU Member States. The result will be the most comprehensive database to date, containing firm-, industry-, and country-level compliance metrics. In the second phase, he will use this database to evaluate prevailing theories of deterrence and enforcement, focusing on how the distinct features of digital markets – scale, speed, and technological opacity – disrupt traditional regulatory assumptions. Finally, he will examine what makes a law ‘automatable’ and assess how legal design – terminology, definitions, procedures – can enable scalable, digital-first enforcement, thereby restoring the deterrent function of law in the digital age.

Jianbo Zhang (Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences): A Neonatal anaerobic Gut-microbiome-on-a-Chip to decode bacterial colonization and infant gut T cell maturation (NeoGutChip)

The early days of life are a critical window to develop a healthy relationship with the infant gut microbiota. Because these early residents can train our naïve immune system for later challenges such as infections and allergens. Despite its importance, our understanding on this training process is limited. Therefore, there is a pressing need for an infant gut model to capture the training of beneficial microorganisms on our immune system in early life. In NeoGutChip, Jianbo Zhang will develop a first-of-its-kind avatar of the human infant gut, an in vitro infant Gut-Microbiome-Immune-on-a-chip model. Zhang will use the model to determine the impact of dietary and early bacterial residents on the function of infant gut microbiota, the mucosal barrier, and immune cells. The aim is to identify key infant gut species and bacterial genes that drive these beneficial effects. The successful completion of NeoGutChip will offer a molecular basis to rationally “design” new interventions that directionally promote immune health in babies. Finally, the model can be further developed into a preclinical tool that can be used widely for pediatric biology and medicine.

Jeroen Zuiddam (Korteweg-de Vries Institute for Mathematics): Asymptotic spectra: from algebraic complexity theory to graph theory and beyond (SPECTRA)

When we repeat a task many times, how can we do it most efficiently? This simple question lies at the heart of many challenges in computer science, mathematics and physics: from finding faster computer algorithms, to determining the limits of data transmission in networks, to the optimal packing of geometric shapes. In his research project, Zuiddam will develop a mathematical framework (the asymptotic spectrum) to tackle such ‘economies-of-scale problems’. The asymptotic spectrum method was originally introduced by German mathematician and computer scientist Volker Strassen to understand matrix multiplication algorithms. Zuiddam has recently expanded the method into a unifying theory connecting fields as diverse as graph theory, quantum information and complexity theory. With this framework, he will seek breakthroughs on long-standing open problems, including new algorithms for matrix multiplication and sharper bounds on the Shannon capacity of graphs (a measure of network efficiency), and a deeper understanding of quantum entanglement.