Open Competition Domain Science funds curiosity driven fundamental research form all the disciplines of the Science Domain. M-grants are intended for innovative, high-quality, fundamental research and/or studies involving matters of scientific urgency.

The UvA Faculty of Science projects that receive a grant are: 

Precision matters

Dr Marieke Postma (UvA & Nikhef)

We, the earth, the stars – everything in the universe is made of matter and not antimatter, and we do not know why. An exciting possibility is that this matter-antimatter asymmetry was created just picoseconds after the Big Bang, when the matter particles became massive. This research proposal aims to very precisely alculate the predicitons for this scenario, and to confront it with the wealth of current and upcoming experimental data. 

How to behave effectively?

Dr Anne Rios & Dr Efstratios Gavves (PMC/UvA)

T cells have a unique capacity to recognize and kill tumour cells. However, we still know very little about their specific behaviour that leads to effective elimination of cancer. In this project, we combine expertise in microscopy to follow T cells in space and time during tumour attack and computer vision to recognize behavioural patterns in the resulting microscopy datasets. In doing so, we hope to gain a better understanding of the behavioural strategy of T cells leading to elimination of tumour cells. In the future this information could be used to improve T cell therapy treatment for cancer patients.