Awarded grants and ongoing projects

Here, we invite you to explore our latest academic achievements through recently awarded grants and ongoing reserach projects.

In 2024, Oksana Kavatsyuk has been awarded an NWO/NRO grant for her project Gender differences among students in active-learning classrooms in university STEM education.

Active-learning strategies are considered to be the state of the art in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) university classrooms as they allow to activate and engage students with the learning material and content. However, there are also concerns that an active-learning approach can trigger anxiety, lower self-confidence and stress because of negative peer evaluation, particularly among female students. A recent study by Aguillon et al. (2020) reported that design of these strategies often benefits male students rather than fostering gender equity. This project aims to critically review and test best practices for gender inclusive active-learning classrooms.

In 2023, Bettina van Hoven has been awarded an NWO grant of 400.000 euro for her project Everyday Geographies of Being and Becoming Disabled. Using a community-based participatory research approach, the project explores and analyses everyday experiences of being and becoming disabled.

The project will focus on:

• What are everyday, lived experiences of (social) encounter and interaction of persons with disabilities in urban spaces?

• To what extent do physical, socio-cultural, a!ective, economic and policy/ governance dimensions affect these everyday experiences?

• To what extent can inclusive spaces, places and practices be identified that may instigate new practices and perceptions by those frequenting such places (nondisabled and disabled)? What spaces and encounters can be enabling and conducive to ‘lived citizenship’?

• Which ‘lessons’ can be identified from involving community stakeholders multi-method community-based participatory research, how can these lessons best be communicated, and to what extent are these transferable?

• The research team will collaborate with sHeerenloo/Noorderbrug, an organisation that provides care and housing for people with acquired brain injuries, deafness with complex problems, and chronic neuromuscular diseases.

In 2022, the Dutch Research Council ( NWO ) has awarded a Vidi grant of €800,000 to Associate Professor Simon Friederich , scholar in the department of Humanities at University College Groningen.

With this grant, Friederich will develop his own innovative five-year research plan and will establish his own research group in the foundations of quantum physics.

Between 2022-2026, Dr. Ritumbra Manuvie will be a consortium partner in ELSA -NN Lab with multiple partners at UCG, UMCG, Hanze Uni.

The ELSA AI Lab Northern Netherlands (ELSA-NN) is committed to the promotion of healthy living, working and ageing. It is one of the five labs established under the NWO and Netherlands AI Coalition call to establish ‘Human-centred AI for an inclusive society - towards an ecosystem of Trust’. The consortium led by Senior Researcher  Mirjam Plantinga  from the UMCG and co-applicants from the University of Groningen, and the Hanze University of Applied Science is awarded a  2.2 million euro  grant for the lab. UCG lecturer  Dr. Ritumbra Manuvie  along with  Prof. Jeanne Mifsud Bonnici  (Faculty of Law) will be co-leading the research on legal and socio-political aspects.

Alongside UCG teaching, Dr. Ferdinand Lewis is also Director of Science and Education for Arts in Health Netherlands (AiHN), which is a project of the Aletta Jacobs School of Public Health and is supported by
Nationaal Programma Groningen, University of Groningen, and University College Groningen.

"The mission of AiHN is to advance the arts in health field in the Netherlands. This means that I write, design, and facilitate research. I am always trying to move the field forward by advocating for arts in health research among scholars, agencies, and policy-makers. At AiHN we network very actively to connect researchers with funders, projects, and other resources. At this moment, we are working on an arts-based community project in the earthquake region of the Netherlands, and and also leading the development of a national white paper that will set the agenda for the research, education, and practice of arts in health in the Netherlands. Also, because arts in health is an emerging field, I make certain that our new educational programs and curricula are rigorously supported by research. I oversee a number of student arts in health researchers, and each year I co-supervise the annual UCG Year Two research-based project on an arts-in health theme."  

Between 2022-2024, Dr Ryan Wittingslow worked on his project "From Form to Function and Back Again: An Integrated Philosophy of Design" , for which he has received a Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation In this project Wittingslow drawed on the insights of both philosophy of technology and philosophical aesthetics to build a common framework for philosophers, design theorists, and other scholars and practitioners who talk and think about design. He calls this framework an 'integrated philosophy of design'.