Membrane fusion is a vital process in living organisms and is mediated by zipper-like proteins.

A modern ship design process is subject to a wide variety of constraints such as safety constraints, regulations, and physical constraints.

Human civilization consumes a huge amount of fossil fuels, which has resulted in an atmospheric CO2 level which has not been higher in over 800 millennia.

Surface acoustic waves (SAWs) are mechanical waves that travel along the surface of a material and find many applications in modern technologies due to the ease of excitation on piezoelectric substrates via interdigital transducers (IDTs).

Promotores: R. Cramer, A.K. Lenstra, Co-Promotor: B.M.M. de Weger

Promotor: W. Jaffe, Co-promotor: K. Meisenheimer

Promotor: W. Jiskoot, Co-promotor: A. Hawe

It is a common technique in global optimization with expensive black-box functions to learn a surrogate-model of the response function from past evaluations and use it to decide on the location of future evaluations.

Prostate cancer (PCa) is one of the most prevalent cancer in males.

New drugs for use as tuberculosis (TB) treatment are needed due to the constrains of classical antibiotics against TB and the rise of antibiotic-resistant strains, making TB a harder and harder disease to treat.

This thesis aims to improve the detection from ultra-weak single emitter by enhancing their emission properties with plasmonic nanostructures. We exploit the wet-chemically synthesized single crystalline gold nanorods (GNRs) as our basic frameworks in the whole studies, simply because of their unique…

Promotor: Ed F. Deprettere, Co-promotor: Todor P. Stefanov

This thesis investigates opinion dynamics on random graphs through the lens of the voter model, a classical interacting particle system used to describe how consensus emerges in networks.

Single-layer graphene (SLG) has attracted considerable interest as a proton exchange membrane for direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs), owing to its atomic thickness, mechanical robustness, and unique proton permeability.

The overall theme of this thesis is to complement the electrochemical data acquired in fuel cell research with in situ X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and soft X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS).

Promotor: G.A. van der Marel, Co-promotor: J.D.C. Codée

Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) is a major cereal crop that millions of subsistence farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) rely on. However, the scourging impact of the root parasitic weed Striga (Striga hermonthica, a.k.a. “witch-weed”) has remained a major constraint hampering the productivity of sorghum in…

Promotor: Prof.dr. R. Verpoorte, Co-Promotor: Dr. Young Hae Choi

The energy system is at the heart of two of the greatest challenges of the 21st century: decreasing CO2 emissions to meet the ambitions of the Paris agreement while fulfilling the growing energy demand associated with the economic aspirations of a growing world population.

Interactive exploration of large volumes of data is increasingly common, as data scientists attempt to extract interesting information from large opaque data sets. This scenario presents a difficult challenge for traditional database systems, as (1) nothing is known about the query workload in advance,…

Solar energy is used by photosynthetic organisms to drive energy required cellular processes. Is absorbed by two groups of pigments, located in the LHCs.

Promotores: Prof.dr. A.G.G.M. Tielens, Prof.dr. L. Kaper (UvA)

A management strategy has been developed for field margins to reduce pesticide drift to non-target areas and to promote biodiversity on arable land. To this end, 3 and 6 m wide strips along the edges of winter wheat, sugar beet and potato crops have been left unsprayed with herbicides and insecticides…

Promotor: S.M. Verduyn Lunel, Co-promotor: O.W. van Gaans

Cardiovascular diseases are a leading cause of death worldwide, and better models are urgently needed for disease progression studies and drug development.

The function of TLRs in innate immunity has aroused worldwide attention soon after its discovery. Because of the broad functions of TLR2 in innate immunity, the drive for the development of TLR2-targeted vaccines or therapeutic treatments has accelerated in the last decades.

Promotor: P.G.L. Klinkhamer, Co-Promotores: K. Vrieling, P.P.J. Mulder

Geometric phases lead to a nontrivial interference result when an electron's different quantum mechanical paths choices encircle a magnetic coil in an Aharonov-Bohm experiment.

Principles of Environmental Sciences provides a comprehensive picture of the principles, concepts and methods that are applicable to problems originating from the interaction between the living and non-living environment and mankind. Both the analysis of such problems and the way solutions to environmental…

Filamentous Actinobacteria, such as Streptomyces, produce a plethora of chemically diverse bioactive metabolites that have found applications across medicine, agriculture and biotechnology.

Pharmaceutical companies, governments and the general public have become increasingly aware that animal models used in drug testing lack vital aspects to serve as an accurate representation of human biology. As models of the human body should become more physiologically relevant, animal models no longer…

Promotor: Prof.dr. E.F. van Dishoeck

Humans perceive the real world through their sensory organs: vision, taste, hearing, smell, and touch. In terms of information, we consider these different modesalso referred to as different channels of information or modals.

Including modelling as part of software development appears to have various benefits.

One of the key limitations of the direct imaging of exoplanets at small angular separations are quasi-static speckles that originate from evolving non-common path aberrations (NCPA) to which the primary adaptive optics system is inherently blind. The main focus of this thesis is the development and…

Ice, the solid state of water, plays an important role on our planet as well as the entire universe.Despite the fact that an individual water molecule has a very simple structure, its chemical bonding in the solid phase can be surprisingly complex.

The ongoing increase in antimicrobial resistance combined with the low discovery of novel antibiotics is a serious threat to our health care.

One of the effects of climate change is the phenomenon of desertification, a process that occurs in semi-arid and arid areas and causes land degradation as well as vegetation loss. Due to the lack of resources, vegetation self-organizes to sustain itself by forming large-scale spatial patterns.

Promotor: G.P. van Wezel, Co-Promotor: E. Vijgenboom

Organisms often need to adapt more efficiently and devise new strategies for surviving difficult ecological circumstances.

Promotor: Prof.dr. R. Verpoorte, Co-Promotores: N.R. Mustafa, A.E. Schulte

Dit gedeelte bevat een overzicht van onze alumni, het loopbaanperspectief naast het doctoraat en "Alumni in beeld", waar we enkele voorbeelden geven van de carrières van sommige van onze alumni na hun promotie.

In de tweede helft van de negentiende eeuw groeide Amsterdam uit tot hoofdstad van Nederland. Maar zagen de negentiende-eeuwse Amsterdammers zichzelf ook als Nederlanders? Dit boek laat zien hoe dienstmeisjes en schoenmakers, winkeliers en schooljongens hun Nederlanderschap in het dagelijkse Amsterdamse…

The physical origin of the dozens of stellar-mass binaries, the mergers of which have been detected by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration via gravitational waves, is still unknown.

“Temminck’s Order” is the scientific biography of Coenraad Jacob Temminck (1778–1850), a Dutch naturalist and the first director of ’s Rijks Museum van Natuurlijke Historie in Leiden.

This thesis is devoted to an in-depth examination of the various effects of disorder in the cuprate high-temperature superconductors.

Lezing

Promotor: Prof.dr. E.F. Smets. Co-promotores: B. Gravendeel, F. Pupulin