Ten new AYA members!

The Amsterdam Young Academy welcomes ten new members from the University of Amsterdam (UvA), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) and Amsterdam UMC (AUMC). We would like you to get to know them, so in order to do so, we’ve let them introduce themselves to you.

Here’s an overview of our new members:

If you’d like to meet them al individually, here are the individual introductions of our new members!

Animesh Trivedi

Dr. ir. Animesh Trivedi is a tenured Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at VU Amsterdam. He leads the Storage-Networking (StoNet) research group in the Massivizing Computer Systems (MCS) group. His research interests lie in building fast and efficient systems using modern hardware. Prior to joining VU Amsterdam in 2019, he has worked as a Research Staff Member (RSM) at the IBM Research Lab in Zürich. He holds a PhD and Master from ETH Zürich.

Aybüke Özgün

Dr. Aybüke Özgün is a tenured Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Institute for Logic, Language and Computation of the UvA. She specializes in logic and formal epistemology. Before her current appointment, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Logic of Conceivability project at the ILLC, UvA and the Arché Research Center at the University of st. Andrews.

Evgenia Lysova

Dr. Evgenia I. Lysova is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the department of Management and Organization at the VU Amsterdam. She is on a mission to understand how to enable and sustain greater experiences of meaningfulness in individuals’ work and careers with the help of organizations. Her expert research on meaningful work, work as a calling, careers, and Corporate Social Responsibility has appeared in international peer-reviewed journals such as Human Relations, Personnel Psychology, Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, and Journal of Vocational Behavior, among others. Evgenia has been invited to deliver talks at numerous scholarly conferences as well as practitioner workshops and events. She often organizes conferences and events to stimulate scholarly community-building around meaningful work and to promote academic-practitioner conversations on the topic.

Frederic Béen

Dr. Frederic Béen is Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemistry for Environment & Health at the Faculty of Science of the VU Amsterdam. He researches how you can get more information from Suspect and Non Target Screening data in a faster and easier way. The equipment and methods have been around for years but are becoming increasingly advanced. This greatly increases the speed at which large amounts of data are generated. Frederic develops new data analysis tools with colleagues.

Gea Dreschler

Dr. Gea Dreschler is an Assistant Professor of English Linguistics within the Department of Language, Literature & Communication at VU Amsterdam. She is also the academic director of the Academic Language Programme (ALP) of the Faculty of Humanities (VU). Her research interests include syntax, information structure, language change and contrastive Dutch-English linguistics. Most of her current research can be summarized as work on unusual types of subjects and subjects in unusual places.

Lisa Beinborn

Dr. Lisa Beinborn is an Assistant Professor for Natural Language Processing at the Faculty of Humanities of VU Amsterdam. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on cognitively inspired language processing and multilingual models.

Mark Boukes

Dr. Mark Boukes is Associate Professor of Corporate Communication in the department of Communication Science at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of the UvA. His research interests include, but are definitively not limited to, journalism, media effects, infotainment, and (digital) research methods. In 2022, he received the “Early Career Scholar Award” of the International Communication Association. His research has been recognized with multiple awards (e.g., 5 ICA Top Paper awards) and prestigious grants (e.g., NWO Veni, NWO Vidi).

Melissa Hooijmans

Dr. Melissa Hooijmans is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine at the Amsterdam UMC. She is an expert on quantitative MRI methods and applications for skeletal muscle, a human movement scientist and specialized in employing MRI methods for clinical applications. Her research aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of muscle function in relation to structure. Gaining insight into the impact of structural changes on muscle function is the crucual next step in ageing, disease and injury assessment.

Tessa Blanken

Dr. Tessa Blanken is a postdoctoral researcher at the Psychological Methods department at the University of Amsterdam. In her research, she uses network analyses, complexity science, and other data scientific techniques to investigate research questions that are societally relevant. After completing her PhD in early 2020, she co-founded the interdisciplinary platform Science versus Corona, including a data consultancy desk, to unite scientists across disciplines to understand and combat the coronavirus. She led the work on behavioral contact networks with the goal to identify behavioural interventions to mitigate the virus spread. Currently, she focuses on two research lines: one on the role of sleep in the development, prevention, and intervention of depression; and another on human behaviour simulation to measure, explain, and model human behaviour with the goal to find substantiated and practical solutions to societal questions.

Yusuf Celik

Dr. Yusuf Celik is Assistant Professor Digital Humanities and Islam at the Faculty of Religion and Theology at VU Amsterdam. His research interests are mainly focused on philosophical hermeneutics and intertextuality. He explores both research interests in relation to the digital humanities. After his Masters in Theology and Religious Studies at the VU, Çelik obtained his PhD in Edinburgh on epistemology and hermeneutics of the Quran. He subsequently worked as a researcher at the University of Utrecht and subsequently at Harvard Law School.