Promotor: Prof.dr. A.W. van der Vaart

While ecosystems have concrete benefits for human society, these benefits are typically overlooked in decision-making.

Promotores: Prof.dr. W.J.G.M. Peijnenburg & Dr. M.G. Vijver

In light of climate change, it is crucial to determine whether plant species can adapt to future climates to avoid extinction. Plants adapt to various conditions by altering their functional traits, such as leaf size or photosynthetic rate. Some traits appear linked and vary together between species,…

The availability of indicators based on social media has opened the possibility to track the online interactions between social media users and scholarly entities.

Carbon dioxide capture and utilization technologies are necessary to create a truly circular economy. The electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide to formate is an appealing carbon utilization method as it can be performed at room temperature and pressure, it only requires two electrons, and it has…

Promotor: Prof.dr. J.M. van Ruitenbeek, Prof.dr. R.M. Tromp

This dissertation is organised into three parts, each addressing a distinct research area related to Gibbs measures.

Promotor: P.J.J. Hooykaas, Co-Promotor: E.J. van der Zaal

Promotor: T.H. Oosterkamp

Fundamental research in the ALgebra, Geometry And Number Theory

Plant diversity is essential for us and our planet as it sustains the stability of our ecosystems, provides vital materials and food to us and supports many ecosystem services.

Mechanical forces are known to play an important role in bacterial colonies. In this dissertation, we study the self-organization at various stages of growing bacterial colonies, and focus on the mechanical effects of cell growth.

In this thesis, we use low-frequency and high-frequency radio observations to address the following questions regarding quasars: is the radio loud/quiet quasar dichotomy real?

Tin electrodeposition applications have rapidly evolved in the past 25 years.

A complex community of microbes develops in the infant gut shortly after birth. We call this community the infant gut microbiota. The microbiota influences the health of the infant, which makes the composition and function of the infant gut microbiota an important topic to study.

As a contribution to the changing legislation and evolving societal attitudes concerning environmental issues, this project aims to enhance and manipulate the plants’ own natural defense mechanisms against western flower thrips (WFT).

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