NWO Vidi, recent awardees

2026

• Intuitive therapist robot patient physical interaction is worth a thousand words

  Beatrice Luciani · Delft University of Technology · NL

  Robotic systems can enhance the amount and repeatability of physical guided motor training. Yet their real-world adoption is limited, partly due to non-intuitive trainer/therapist-trainee/patient interactions. To address this gap, we present a haptic teleoperation system for trainers to remotely guide and monitor the movements of a trainee wearing an arm exoskeleton. The trainer can physically interact with the exoskeleton through a commercial handheld haptic device via virtual contact points at

• Cradle of Life: From the Formation of Stars to Habitable Worlds with the SKAO

  the Cradle of Life working group

  This chapter provides an overview of the different science cases covered by the "Cradle of Life" working group, which aims to leverage the capabilities of the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) to trace the physical and chemical pathways toward stars and planets formation, how such stars impact their planets, and whether life could exist in such conditions. At its highest frequencies, the SKAO will probe the earliest stages of the raw material fuelling planet formation, while enabling dee

• Model-error estimation and model adaptivity for hyperbolic moment equations in one dimension

  Rik Verbiest · University of Groningen · NL

  Abstract Microflows like Knudsen pumps often include rarefied gases featuring different degrees of rarefaction. This different modeling complexity requires space- and time-adaptive rarefied gas models that resolve the physical effects efficiently in each subdomain of the microflow. Different-order moment models are effective at describing rarefied gases in microflows with respective levels of complexity in each subdomain. In this work, analytical model-error estimators for the Hyperbolic Moment

• Future trends of desalination and wastewater treatment accounting for risks of maladaptation

  Marina Andrijevic · International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis · AT

  The intensifying effects of climate change on global water scarcity require ensuring reliable, equitable, and sustainable water supply, with novel technologies becoming increasingly central to adaptation. In this study, we develop projections of wastewater treatment and desalination capacities and analyze their associated energy demand and CO 2 emissions. While technologically mature and rapidly expanding, their future development remains underexamined as a risk of maladaptation that stems from

• The Cannabis Research Image Database (CRESIDA): A standardized and validated image set for studying cannabis cue reactivity

  Janna Cousijn · IVO Addiction Research Institute · NL

  BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Cannabis cue reactivity paradigms are instrumental in studying the behavioral and neurocognitive mechanisms of cannabis use and cannabis use disorders; however, image sets used for cannabis cue reactivity paradigms vary between studies, and the lack of reliability and validity assessment hinders the quality of evidence they generate. The main aim of this study was to create a novel, open access, standardized and representative database of cannabis use-related images includin

• Realification of stably trivial vector bundles

  Niall Taggart

  The set of stably trivial complex vector bundles over complex projective spaces and spheres has a natural group structure when the corank is small enough. With respect to this group structure, the operations of taking the underlying real vector bundle (realification) and of adding a trivial line bundle (stabilisation), are group homomorphisms. Building on Hu's recent enumerations of stably trivial complex bundles, we compute these homomorphisms in a range by using Weiss calculus to translate the

• Congruent Kinesthetic and Tactile Haptic Rendering Accelerates the Learning of Highly Dynamic Virtual Sensorimotor Tasks

  Laura Marchal-Crespo · Delft University of Technology · NL

  Advances in haptic technologies enable rich, multi-channel haptic rendering of interactions with virtual objects during virtual reality training. However, it remains an open question whether multi-channel haptic rendering (kinesthetic and tactile) provides superior motor learning and transfer when training dynamic tasks compared to simpler, single-channel sensory information. We investigated how 40 participants learned to invert and balance a virtual pendulum after training under four haptic ren

• Collective memory and amnesia: explaining continuities and discontinuities in the history of the Belgian sans-papiers movement

  Thomas Swerts · Erasmus University Rotterdam · NL

  A substantial body of work examines how social movements draw on past struggles, circulate repertoires transnationally and preserve traditions of protest. However, less attention has been paid to the processes through which memory can fail, be silenced or erased. Existing scholarship has rarely examined how movements led by precarious actors, such as undocumented migrants’ collectives, construct – and sometimes risk losing- collective memory under conditions of political hostility. In this paper

• To rest or to roam: Functional habitat use of an insectivorous bat species during active and resting behavior

  Yali Si · Leiden University · NL

  As vital players in many terrestrial ecosystems, insectivorous bats in Europe are of high conservation priority and protected by international law. However, ongoing human expansion and land-use change have profoundly altered their habitats, and understanding their habitat use is essential for effective conservation planning. Nevertheless, behavioral states, particularly night resting, are rarely considered when quantifying habitat use. This study presents the first GPS-tracking-based quantitativ

• Defect-Induced Single-Photon Emission in ZnPS ₃

  Magdalena Grzeszczyk · National University of Singapore · SG

  High Resolution Image Download MS PowerPoint Slide Research on single photon sources in layered materials has been limited so far to transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) and hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) as hosting platforms. These quantum emitters exhibit advantages due to the distinct semiconducting and insulating characteristics of the two classes of materials, which enable their integration with van der Waals heterostructures and devices. Here, we report single photon emission in ZnPS 3,

• Saddlepoint Approximations for Hawkes Jump-Diffusion Processes with an Application to Risk Management*

  Roger J. A. Laeven · Quantitative BioSciences · US

  We propose a statistical model based on Hawkes processes in which large financial losses can arise in close succession serially as well as cross-sectionally. We derive in closed form saddlepoint approximations to the tails of profit and loss distributions, both marginal and joint, and use them to construct explicit risk measure formulae that account for the fact that a given financial institution’s losses make it more likely that that institution will experience further losses, and that other fi

• A ‘Proper’ Celebration: The Old Hispanic <i>Commune Sanctorum</i> and its Affordance for Individualised Liturgies

  Melanie Shaffer · University of Bristol · GB

  The collective intoning of chant and prayer performed on a saint’s feast day tells us much about what the composers, compilers, and celebrants of that liturgy understood and valued about that saint in their community. Liturgies composed specifically in honour of a particular saint thus understandably dominate the scholarship. This article instead spotlights the Commune sanctorum, those materials able to be used for the liturgy of any saint in a given saintly category. I show how Commune sanctoru

• GRASPing experience-dependent protein expression signatures enriched for hippocampal engram cell synapses

  Renee M. Pullen · Amsterdam Neuroscience · NL

  Enhanced synaptic wiring onto sparsely distributed memory engram cells supports contextual memory storage and recall, with negative-valence memories exhibiting greater salience. Protein-level adaptations of input-specific synaptic connectivity onto hippocampal CA1 engram cells, however, remain largely unexplored. By combining spatiotemporally restricted synapse labeling, sorting, and mass spectrometry, we generated a discovery-oriented proteomic dataset from samples enriched for CA1 engram cell

• Kant on Citizenship and Poverty

  Nicholas Vrousalis · Erasmus University Rotterdam · NL

  According to Kant, citizenship amounts to freedom (Freiheit), equality (Gleichheit), and civil self-sufficiency (Selbständigkeit). This Element provides a unifying interpretation of these three elements. Vrousalis argues that Kant affirms the idea of interdependent independence: in the just society, citizens have independent use of their interdependent rightful powers. Kant therefore thinks of the modern state as a system of cooperative production, in which reciprocal entitlements to one another

• How does Graph Structure Modulate Membership-Inference Risk for Graph Neural Networks?

  Megha Khosla

  Graph neural networks (GNNs) are widely used for tasks such as node classification and link prediction, but their use in sensitive settings raises concerns about training-data leakage. Prior work on privacy leakage in GNNs largely borrows assumptions from non-graph domains, overlooking the role of graph structure. We argue for a graph-specific analysis of privacy risk and study how graph structure affects node-level membership inference. We formalize membership inference (MI) over node-neighborh

• Breaking down ALD:Investigating pathomechanisms using hiPSC-derived CNS models

  R. Montoro Ferrer

  <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:6.0pt;text-align:justify;line-height: 115%">Adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD) is an X-linked peroxisomal neurometabolic disorder caused by pathogenic variants in the <i>ABCD1</i> gene, resulting in impaired peroxisomal ß-oxidation and accumulation of very long-chain fatty acids (VLCFA). ALD clinical presentation is heterogeneous and unpredictable, including progressive spinal cord axonal degeneration, adrenal insufficiency, and leukodystrophy. Although VLCFA ac

• Uncertainty-aware machine learning for core-loss background subtraction in EELS

  Sònia Conesa-Boj · Delft University of Technology · NL

  Abstract Quantitative electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) critically depends on accurate background subtraction, yet standard approaches rely on deterministic parametric fits and provide no statistically rigorous uncertainty estimates. This limitation is particularly severe in the core-loss regime, where the background must be extrapolated into the ionisation-edge window, hindering reliable and automated analyses. Here, we introduce a physics-informed, uncertainty-aware machine learning fra

• Phytoglobin 1 in plant hypoxia acclimation and development: integrating oxygen sensing, nitric oxide homeostasis, and redox balance

  Elmar van der Wijk · Radboud University Nijmegen · NL

  Hypoxia is integral to the plant life cycle, occurring during both development and environmental stresses like flooding. The class I phytoglobins (PGB1s) have emerged as important regulators of plant hypoxia responses in both these contexts due to their multifaceted roles in nitric oxide (NO) and ROS homeostasis, and alternative energy generation. Physiological PGB1 expression overlaps with developmental hypoxic niches, facilitating hypoxic energy generation through the PGB1-NO cycle. Sustained

• Too honest and humble to run for office? Citizens’ personality traits, nascent ambition and recruitment’

  Marc van de Wardt

• Pupil size reflects the content of covertly attended afterimages

  Ana Vilotijević · University of Groningen · NL

  Does attention operate within afterimages? Here we show that it does, using a novel pupillometry-based paradigm. Participants fixated centrally while bright and dark peripheral stimuli were presented, and a central cue directed attention to one of them. Over time, the stimuli perceptually faded due to adaptation and were then removed, leaving strong, negative afterimages. We found that pupil size tracked the brightness of the attended stimulus both during perceptual fading, when stimuli were pre

• Extracting production fractions of $b$ hadrons from exclusive semi-leptonic decays

  Carolina Bolognani

  Ratios of production fractions of $b$ hadrons are a dominant source of uncertainty in many LHC analyses, in particular in measurements with $B_s$ mesons. The currently used value for $f_s/f_d$ is based on a combination of hadronic and semi-inclusive semi-leptonic decays, and relies in part on assumptions about the underlying decays that are hard to quantify. We propose an independent alternative method to obtain this quantity by measuring ratios of the exclusive semi-leptonic decays $\bar B_{(s)

• Bootstrapping GARCH models under dependent innovations

  Barend Spanjers · Tinbergen Institute · NL

  Abstract This study reflects on the inconsistency of the fixed-design residual bootstrap procedure for GARCH models under dependent innovations. We introduce a recursive- design residual block bootstrap procedure to accurately quantify the uncertainty around parameter estimates and the next period’s volatility. A simulation study provides evidence for the validity of the recursive-design residual block bootstrap under dependent innovations. The resulting confidence intervals are not only valid b

• Synchronized modulation Kelvin probe force microscopy for surface photovoltage studies in optoelectronic systems

  Rebecca Saive · University of Twente · NL

  We introduce synchronized modulation Kelvin probe force microscopy (SM-KPFM), an in-operando technique that synchronizes external stimulus modulation, such as illumination or bias, with the scanning direction of the atomic force microscope to minimize artifacts from drift, thermal effects, and probe degradation. In synchronized illumination KPFM, the sample is illuminated during retrace and dark during trace, enabling real-time comparison of surface potentials within a single raster frame. At th

• Deep behavioral phenotyping of pathogen infected mosquitoes reveals species-specific behavior changes enhancing transmission

  Felix JH Hol · Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique · FR

  Abstract Mosquito-borne pathogens are often proposed to alter mosquito behavior to enhance transmission, yet the prevalence, magnitude, and consequences of such effects remain unclear. Using custom high- throughput behavioral assays and deep-learning analysis, we quantified the blood-feeding behavior of more than 5,000 mosquitoes, and long-term activity patterns of more than 1,000 mosquitoes across six clinically relevant mosquito–pathogen combinations. Infection effects were highly species-spec

• Does heat tolerance vary with rates of oxygen production in photosymbiotic cnidarians?

  Elise M. J. Laetz · University of Groningen · NL

  Oxygen acquisition and delivery to tissues is believed to be a key factor in heat tolerance, but testing this link has been challenging owing to methodological limitations to separate processes related to oxygen acquisition and oxygen delivery. In this study, we altered tissue oxygenation by manipulating light intensity using cnidarians that host endosymbiotic algae as model species. We first verified that light intensity determines net photosynthetic rates, showing that all species produced oxy

• Entanglement Recycling in Two-Step Port-Based Teleportation

  Piotr Kopszak · Institute of Theoretical Physics · CN

  A protocol involving the repetitive (twofold, to be precise) application of PBT protocol to the same resource is studied. The quantities characterizing the resulting protocol, so-called \textit{two-step PBT}, namely \textit{enatnglement fidelity} and \textit{success probability} are provided for two scenarios, relying on application of pretty-good measurement, i.e. deterministic and probabilistic PBT with non-EPR resource. This results show that two-step PBT is an accurate protocol, provided the

• Suspension cultivation of mosquito cell lines for the production of the mosquito-borne flavivirus Usutu virus in a stirred-tank bioreactor

  Dennis Kenbeek · Wageningen University & Research · NL

  Mosquito-borne pathogens are a global health burden. The realization of a scalable serum-free mosquito cell suspension cultivation method would enable the production of novel biotechnological products, including vaccines, recombinant proteins, and (modified) viruses for biological control. This study reports the adaptation of two Aedes-derived cell lines, C6/36 and U4.4, to serum-free suspension conditions using the chemically defined EX-CELL medium. Both cell lines achieved high cell concentrat

• Summarizing classed region maps with a disk choreme

  Steven van den Broek · Eindhoven University of Technology · NL

  Chorematic diagrams are highly reduced schematic maps of geospatial data and processes. They can visually summarize complex situations using only a few simple shapes (choremes) placed upon a simplified base map. Due to the extreme reduction of data in chorematic diagrams, they tend to be produced manually; few automated solutions exist. In this paper we consider the algorithmic problem of summarizing classed region maps, such as choropleth or land use maps, using a chorematic diagram with a sing

• Electrically tunable strong coupling in a hybrid-2D excitonic metasurface for optical modulation

  T.H. Hoekstra · University of Amsterdam · NL

  Atomically thin semiconductors exhibit tunable exciton resonances that can be harnessed for dynamic manipulation of visible light in ultra-compact metadevices. However, the rapid nonradiative decay and dephasing of excitons at room temperature limit current active excitonic metasurfaces to a few-percent efficiencies. Here, we leverage the combined merits of pristine 2D heterostructures and non-local dielectric metasurfaces to enhance the excitonic light-matter interaction, achieving strong and e

• Enhancing plasmonic superconductivity in layered materials via dynamical Coulomb engineering

  Y. in ’t Veld · Universität Hamburg · DE

  screening as a method for precisely tailoring bosonic modes to optimize many-body properties. We show that "bosonic engineering" of plasmon modes can be used to enhance plasmon-induced superconducting critical temperatures of layered superconductors in metallic environments by up to an order of magnitude, due to the formation of interlayer hybridized plasmon modes with enhanced superconducting pairing strength. We determine optimal properties of the screening environment to maximize critical tem