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Three researchers from Dynamics of Youth have received an ERC Consolidator Grant: Ellen Hamaker, Stefan van der Stigchel and Sander Thomaes. The European Union offers this €2 million grant to researchers with a proven track record in science. This money enables scientists to pay for their research over the next five years.

This year, the European Union has awarded a total of 301 ERCs to European researchers. The Netherlands, with 32 ERCs awarded, ranks fourth after Germany (52), the United Kingdom (50) and France (43) in terms of the number of ERCs received. Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ received a total of seven awards this time.

Models

Ellen Hamaker, professor of Longitudinal Data Analysis, plans to develop techniques and tools that will enable researchers to analyse the data that they have collected through smartphones and other wearables more effectively. One of the tools will be an interactive website. 'Scientists use statistical models to interpret their data. There are a great many possible models, but researchers generally tend to use the model that’s most commonly used within their discipline. That is not necessarily the model that is best suited to their data and research question. I want all researchers to be able to access the wide range of models available simply and easily. By developing an interactive website, I hope that, in the future, researchers will be able to identify the most appropriate model more easily.'

Brain storage

Professor of Cognitive Psychology Stefan van der Stigchel wants to establish how much information from the world that people perceive is actually stored in the brain. 'It’s actually not very much,' says the Utrecht researcher. 'It doesn’t need to be stored, either, because most of it is directly accessible by looking. You let this information go; you don’t store it.' Van der Stigchel explains that the amount of information that is stored varies from one person to another. 'Especially if you look at people with memory problems. It’s more difficult for them to store information from the world around them. Among other things, I plan to find out, using virtual reality where appropriate, how much information they store from the world that they see and how much they do not.'

Environmentally friendly teenagers

Professor of Developmental Psychology Sander Thomaes studies the behaviour of adolescents. He plans to use the grant from the ERC to focus his research on how secondary school students can be encouraged to behave in a way that is as environmentally friendly as possible. 'Ask the average teenager whether they care about climate change and they’ll definitely say "yes". But if you look at their behaviour, this often deviates from the ideal. To reduce this gap, we plan to set up an intervention to see if we can make young people’s behaviour more environmentally friendly by appealing to their sense of justice. For example, we will show an intervention group the chemicals that the clothing industry uses to make their clothes, and the impact that the discharge of these chemicals has on the health of people who live in the vicinity of the factory.'