“I believe the world would be a better place if we addressed complex problems from various points of view. But it’s hard, it means that we need to communicate in ways that are new to us - and who wants to acknowledge that they still have to learn to ‘talk to others’?“
— Dr Sandra Hofmann, Eindhoven Young Academy
CUCo executive team
Corinne Lamain
CUCo Director
Corinne Lamain cares about research contributing to social and environmental justice. She wishes to contribute to that by listening well, shifting the narrative in academia and designing bold funding mechanisms that prioritise trust, equitable collaborations and fun. Before joining CUCo, Corinne worked for over a decade as policy adviser at WOTRO Science for Global Development, a department of the Dutch Science Council (NWO). There she coordinated research programmes with focus areas on conflicts over natural resources and climate change, food and nutrition security, and more. She also co-developed the Impact Plan approach within NWO. Corinne is a PhD candidate in the field of Political Ecology, looking at climate security discourses as part of climate action in the Eastern Himalayas. Whenever opportunity arises she is outside, growing food and watching birds. In addition she reads, lots of reading, preferably classic novels.
Contact Corinne here
Helma van Luttikhuizen
Tentacular Event Manager
Helma van Luttikhuizen cares about bringing together different kind of ‘worlds’. At CUCo she likes to do this through organizing unusual events: a place where people can experience, learn, create, meet and understand. Events which inspire to take action to contribute to a more livable and equal world. Before joining CUCo, Helma managed a diverse range of projects and events within governmental, business and non-for-profit contexts in the Netherlands and abroad. She liked to discover different disciplines all focused on development of human beings. She did this by completing a Pedagogical Science Bachelor followed by a Master’s in Organizational Design and Development and currently studying Cultural Anthropology by following courses at Utrecht University next to her role as event manager for the alliance. Whenever possible, Helma is reading books, involved in many social activities, tries to play piano and where she can she likes to travel and discover the world.
Contact Helma here
Anke de Vrieze
Knowledge & Learning Adviser
Anke de Vrieze is an anthropologist with an unusual career path. After her studies, she ventured into organic agriculture and ambitioned becoming a farmer, but landed on studying and supporting urban farming instead. This interest brought her to the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University, where she coordinated a European research and training network around sustainable-placing and discovered a passion for designing and enabling meaningful research collaborations. She’s co-founder of Re.imaginary and the WUR Transformative Learning Hub, and works for one day per week as engagement coordinator at the Centre for Space Place and Society. She joined the CUCo team in September 2022 as Knowledge and Learning Officer. In this capacity, she seeks to support teams in effectively collaborating across disciplines and fostering learning across projects. In all the time that is left, she loves to dance, pick wild mushrooms, grow food on the rooftop and prepare tasty meals.
Contact Anke here
Tom Bouwmeester
Secretary
Tom first familiarized himself with the advantages of interdisciplinary research during his master’s in Humanistic Studies. After graduating, he worked in education support at Utrecht University’s Faculty of Geosciences for several years before he took on the secretary position at CUCo. In that capacity, he takes care of all the logistics behind the scenes, while taking a keen interest in what the research projects aim to accomplish, and how their interdisciplinary teamwork could be supported even better. In his free time, Tom writes fiction, plays chess, and likes to go out for the occasional run.
Contact Tom here
CUCo board members
Ayoub Bagheri
Assistant Professor - Utrecht University
Ayoub Bagheri is an Assistant Professor in Data Science at Utrecht University with an interdisciplinary research focus on Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Explainable Machine Learning. By combining these fields, he aims to develop AI-based language models that can address complex challenges in various domains. His research contributions have been significant, particularly in the design and development of open source decision support systems. Throughout his career, he has been a strong advocate of open science, recognising the importance of transparency, collaboration and accessibility in scientific research. He actively promotes the sharing of knowledge, tools and methods within the scientific community. Driven by a deep passion for the social and health sciences, he strives to improve understanding of human behaviour, social dynamics and health outcomes by harnessing the vast amounts of data available and extracting meaningful insights. In the Department of Methodology and Statistics, he leads the Text and Natural Language Processing Lab (https://nlp.sites.uu.nl/), where a dedicated team of more than 10 individuals collaborates on developing research-based tools and open educational materials for text mining and NLP.
Inge Stegeman
Associate Professor - UMC-Utrecht
Inge Stegeman studied Health Sciences at the Vrije University Amsterdam. She obtained her PhD in models for colorectal cancer screening in 2013, after which she was appointed as an epidemiologist at the Department of Otorhinolaryngology of the UMC Utrecht. Her research focus is on the quality of biomedical research with a focus on hearing and tinnitus.
Former & founding CUCo Board members
Pooyan Tamimi Arab
Assistant Professor– Utrecht University
Pooyan Tamimi Arab is an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies and a member of the Utrecht Young Academy and De Jonge Akademie. He combines social scientific approaches to religious studies with political philosophy to think about normative concepts such as religious tolerance, neutrality, and public reason. Tamimi Arab received a Veni-grant for a study of Islam and contested visual culture in 2018 and takes part in the broader research project “Religious Matters in an Entangled World: Things, Food, Bodies, and Texts as Entry Points to the Material Study of Religion in Plural Settings.” Tamimi Arab likes to hang out with quirky people and generally loves the tentacular approach to learning. In recent years he rekindled his passion for numbers by dabbling in statistical approaches to measuring religiosity, for which he was awarded a KNAW Early Career Partnership grant in 2021. A longstanding interest in the philosophy of Benedictus de Spinoza brings some order to his thinking by joining a naturalistic worldview with the humanities’ interpretive understanding of religion and politics.
Max Birk
Assistant Professor - Eindhoven University of Technology
Max Birk works on the intersection of computer science, psychology, and game design at the Department of Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology. In his research, he develops games to experimentally investigate motivation, individual differences, and player experience. He applies his work to challenges in game design, and the development of interventions and assessment paradigms for physical and mental health. His work on avatar customization as a motivational design strategy for improving engagement with technology-enabled services for health received the Canadian Governor General's Gold Medal for outstanding scholastic achievements. His current research on game-based digital biomarkers for stress is funded by a NWO Veni grant, and allows Max to combine his passion for stress research, game development, and assessment strategies. Max is an avid gamer, he enjoys travel, hip hop, and street art.
Marianne Boes
Associate Professor in Pediatric Immunology - UMC-Utrecht
Marianne Boes performed PhD research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and thereafter moved to Harvard Medical School for postdoctoral research. In 2003 she started her own independent research laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, financed in part by an NWO Veni grant and a large NIH-RO1 grant that was awarded to her. Since 2008 she heads the pediatric immunology laboratory in the Wilhelmina Children’s Hospital at UMC-Utrecht. Her research explores mechanisms that drive immune recognition in human disease, using an interdisciplinary approach and usually in collaboration with clinical scientists. Cancer is one example of diseases she works on that moreover touch on many aspects of immune recognition. Her premise is that many diseases have an inflammatory component to them that may be treatable by immune response modification. Besides serving as supervisor for the PhD students in her team, Marianne currently serves as chair of the UMCU-Young Academy and is faculty member of the Education Committee Life Sciences for the faculty of medicine. She is course coordinator of the Advanced Immunology Course at UMC-Utrecht. She thoroughly enjoys to meet and learn from researchers and societal partners in different fields.
Sylvia Brugman
Associate Professor - Wageningen University
Sylvia Brugman’s passion is the complex cross talk between the host and the intestinal microbiota. After a PhD at the UMCG and two postdoc periods at the Erasmus MC and WKZ-UMCU, Sylvia is now an Assistant professor at the Host Microbe Interactomics Group at Wageningen University and Research. In her research Sylvia makes use of the zebrafish as a model organism. Excitingly, in zebrafish you can follow immune cells and microbes in vivo live under the microscope. At Wageningen University and Research, Sylvia and her team study feed/food-induced inflammation (NWO-TTW) and fundamental processes underlying host control of pathobiont species in the intestines (NWO-ENW). Sylvia loves to connect people and feels ‘like a fish in the water’ at CUCo. In her spare time, Sylvia loves to watch and photograph birds and dragonflies all over the world.
Jessica Duncan
Associate Professor - Wageningen University
Jessica Duncan is a researcher and educator committed to social justice. After completing her PhD in Food Policy from City University London (2014), Jessica moved to the Netherlands where she now works as Associate Professor in Rural Sociology at Wageningen University. Jessica is widely recognised for her expertise on the politics of sustainable food system transition. Her main research focus concerns the practices and politics of participation in food policy processes, particularly the relationships (formal and non-formal) between governance organizations, systems of food provisioning, the environment, and the actors engaged in and across these spaces. More specifically, she maps the diverse ways that actors participate in policy-making processes, analysing how the resulting policies are shaped, implemented, challenged, and resisted, and she theorizes about what this means for socio-ecological transformation. Participation and engagement is at the core of her approach. Jessica is learning to play the piano. She is not very good.
Sandra Hofmann
Associate Professor - Eindhoven University of Technology
Sandra Hofmann works on Bioengineering Bone at the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Institute for Complex Molecular Systems at the Eindhoven University of Technology. This involves growing tiny living bone pieces from human cells in the laboratory. Such human cell-based, in vitro bone organoids can be used to investigate how cells interact with each other and with their environment to learn more about human bone health, disease and regeneration. Her current research work is supported by grants from the European Research Council, the Dutch Research Council and the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. In education, she is equally interested in how input parameters will influence the outcome, although this often happens in a more empirical and intuitive fashion, trying to maximize enthusiasm on the topic under investigation. Communication and interaction are already challenging and complex at the cellular level; by becoming a CUCo board member, Sandra is eager to expand this knowledge to the human level.
Susanne Knittel
Assistant Professor - Utrecht University
In her research, Susanne Knittel explores how societies remember the past, particularly when it comes to difficult and traumatic events such as war or genocide: How do certain memories become inscribed into the heritage of a country or region while others are suppressed or forgotten? And what role do cultural artefacts and practices play in processes of and debates around commemoration? While her past research focused on forgotten victims of the Holocaust, she is currently studying how perpetrators of genocide and mass violence are represented in culture, the media, in scholarship and in political and public discourse to understand better how societies deal with questions of guilt, complicity, and responsibility. Interdisciplinarity is at the core of her research and her teaching. She has developed highly innovative courses that revolve around the idea of “traveling concepts” and is currently pioneering an interdisciplinary research and teaching project on deep time, memory, and the Anthropocene. When she isn’t reading novels, Susanne sings, especially early music and opera.
Daniël Lakens
Associate Professor - Eindhoven University of Technology
Daniel Lakens is an experimental psychologist working at the Human-Technology Interaction group at Eindhoven University of Technology. In addition to his empirical work in cognitive and social psychology, he works actively on improving research methods and statistical inferences, and has published on the importance of replication research, sequential analyses and equivalence testing, and frequentist statistics. He was involved in establishing dedicated grants for replication studies by the Dutch science funder NWO, and co-edited the first special issue on Registered Reports in psychology in 2014. His lab is funded until 2022 by a VIDI grant on a project that aims to improve the reliability and efficiency of psychological science. He teaches about better research practices on Coursera, and received the Leamer-Rosenthal Prize for Open Social Science in 2017 for his course ‘Improving Your Statistical Inferences’ in which more than 45.000 learners have enrolled.
Meghann Ormond
Associate Professor - Wageningen University
Meghann Ormond is Associate Professor in Cultural Geography at Wageningen University & Research.. Deeply invested in and concerned with how differently mobile people's roots, rights and vulnerabilities are recognised and included in the places they visit and in which they live, her work focuses on how shifting visions and practices of citizenship and belonging impact transnational mobility, heritage, health and care relationships. Meghann places great emphasis on societal engagement beyond the realm of academia. She regularly develops and supports initiatives together with non-governmental organisations, policymakers and industry actors on issues related to migrant heritage, health equity and accessible tourism. The author of over 35 peer-reviewed publications as well as curator and co-founder of initiatives like Roots Guide and Migrantour Utrecht, Meghann also tries her best to bring about a more humane kind of university in which people of diverse backgrounds can learn from one another and thrive. In light of this, she is co-founder and co-coordinator of the CSPS Transformative Learning Hub at WUR, a member of the Wageningen Young Academy, and a co-developer of Centre for Unusual Collaboration (CUCo)'s interdisciplinary research training programme. She also teaches on and coordinates MSc and PhD-level courses in the philosophy of social science and (transformative and participatory) qualitative research methods.
Daniel Tetteroo
Assistant Professor - Eindhoven University of Technology
Daniel Tetteroo is an assistant professor at the department of Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology. His interests are amongst others in designing for rehabilitation & healthy living, end-user adaptable systems, internet of things, playful interaction, and communities. He is currently leading the Health squad at Industrial Design and is a member of the Eindhoven Young Academy of Engineers. With a background in Computer Science, Human Media Interaction and User System Interaction, his work is at the crossroads of behavioral and computer science. Daniel holds a PhD in Industrial Design from Eindhoven University of Technology, and has worked as visiting researcher at the L3D lab of Colorado University at Boulder. Beyond academic experience, Daniel has gained industrial experience working as UX consultant at Alten. He is also co-founder and CFO of Picoo, a start-up developing a game console for active outdoor play. Both professionally and at home, Daniel enjoys growing and creating ideas, things and plants.
Martine Veldhuizen
Assistant Professor - Utrecht University
Martine Veldhuizen is Assistant Professor at the Department of Languages, Literature and Communication at Utrecht University and was the chair of the Utrecht Young Academy from 2020 until 2022. She is fascinated by the power of words in historical perspective and has published on premodern perceptions of speech in the Low Countries in European context from a legal, ecclesiastical and secular-ethical perspective (1300 -1550). She taught and designed courses on various subjects of cultural and literary history at Utrecht University, William & Mary College, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), University of Amsterdam and Radboud University. Martine was awarded the Gerard Brom CRM Humanities Grant at Radboud University, a grant of Fonds Doctor Catharine van Tussenbroek for research at the Huntington Library (USA) and a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. The history of free speech is currently her focus, mainly after the invention of the printing press (1450-1500). She holds a 3-year grant of The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO Veni), of which the project title is 'Truth-tellers: The Mentality behind Subversive Speech Behaviour in Narratives in the First Printed books in Dutch'. She also received a NWO Internationalisation Grant to set up the research network Free speech in Europe 1400-1750 with partner institutions in Belgium and the United Kingdom.
Jannie Wijnen
Associate Professor - UMC-Utrecht
Jannie Wijnen works in the High Field Magnetic Resonance research group within the Centre for Image Sciences of the UMCU. She is leading the MR Spectroscopy team that focuses on developing novel metabolic imaging techniques and studying metabolism in the human body and brain in various diseases. Her personal goal is to use metabolic imaging in the diagnosis and treatment planning of children with metabolic disorders and cancer. Enabling the study of tissue metabolism directly in the patient will lead to better understanding of the disease in the individual patient and can therefore faster translate to a change in treatment planning, to better help the patient. Currently she is exploring new means to increase speed and robustness of metabolic imaging. Her work has been funded by both personal and consortium grants, amongst them NWO-Veni, KWF and the European Research Council Eurostars!, the latter also involves various (international) industrial partners.