The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded Vidi grants to 3 female researchers of the Faculty of Science. Congratulations on behalf of RISE, Francesca Arici, Melissa McClure, and Renske Onstein!
Uncovering how planets form around other suns
Melissa McClure – Leiden Observatory
Planets are predicted to start forming early, less than a million years after their stars ignite. However, such young planetary systems are still hidden by clouds of cold dust. McClure’s team will use novel data from the James Webb Space Telescope to uncover when, where, and how planets start to form, in the process revealing the compositions of planets actively forming in a sample of young systems. These results will help scientists to interpret the diversity of exoplanets seen in the universe today.
The fate of megafauna-adapted palms with massive fruits
Renske Onstein – Institute of Biology Leiden
Plants with large fruits (megafruits) have evolved collaborations with very large animals (megafauna) to disperse their seeds. Alarmingly, most megafauna have disappeared from the Earth in the last fifty thousand years. Onstein will investigate how megafauna extinctions have affected the seed dispersal of megafruit palms, by evaluating which species co-evolved with megafauna, which ones are no longer dispersed and as a result threatened with extinction, and for which ones humans have replaced megafauna by dispersing the seeds in ecosystems today.
A leap into quantum domains
Francesca Arici – Mathematical Institute
In mathematics, one of the main research goals is to find ways to classify different objects (such as sets, shapes, and functions) in a way that captures their most important characteristics without being repetitive (for example a shoe cabinet based on shoe size). In the quantum world, however, objects behave very differently from what we’re used to. For example, in a regular space, we can describe points and distances between them. But in a quantum space, we sometimes can’t even talk about points in the usual sense. Our goal is to understand these quantum spaces by focusing on a broad class, called quantum domains, and looking at the problem from different angles.
Source: Leiden University researchers receive Vidi grants – Leiden University
