UG honours talented students and researchers during Summer Ceremony

Every year, talented students and researchers from the University of Groningen (UG) are put in the spotlight. During the Summer Ceremony on Friday 6 July, the winners of the GUF-100 prizes, the Gratama Prize and the Wierenga-Rengerink dissertation prize were announced. The international alumni ambassadors for the coming year have also been appointed.

2018 GUF-100 prizes

The GUF-100 prizes for excellent students were first awarded in 1993 on the occasion of the 100th birthday of the Groningen University Fund (GUF). Each GUF-100 prize is the sum of € 2500. The 10 winners of the 2018 GUF-100 prizes are:

Dr Marthe Walvoort wins Gratama Prize

Dr Marthe Walvoort has been awarded the Gratama Prize this year. She is an internationally renowned specialist in glycochemistry and glycobiology. She is in the vanguard of research on the relationship between sugar and health. By biologically synthesising sugars, she has gained insight into how mother’s milk functions, or rather, why breastfeeding contributes to the health of newborn babies. She has also explored the role of sugar in bacterial infections and in multiple sclerosis. Marthe Walvoort makes her scientific work accessible to a wider audience as a public sugar expert for newspapers, in videos and vlogs, and in public presentations.

She worked as a postdoc at MIT Boston, and she has indicated that she will use part of the prize money to go to San Diego in the USA to work on the health effects of breast milk sugars . Marthe Walvoort was appointed a Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the University of Groningen in 2015 and has received substantial research grants , which have enabled her to found her own research group here in Groningen. She will use the rest of the prize money to cover the research costs of the students participating in her research group.

The Gratama Foundation says that Dr Walvoort’s work clearly demonstrates how a young scientist can successfully mix challenging questions, innovative scientific output and socially relevant results, can inspire students and present the results of her research to a general audience. The Gratama Prize is for young scientists who stand out for their innovative, socially relevant and important research. The Prize is awarded to researchers at the University of Groningen and Leiden University. The Prize is €25,000.

Podcast

In the third episode of our podcast ‘In de Wetenschap’ [What's up at the University], Marthe Walvoort talks about her research on sugars. Check out the podcast.

Wierenga-Rengerink Dissertation Prize for Alain Dekker

The Wierenga-Rengerink Prize for the PhD student with the best dissertation in 2017 has been awarded to Dr Alain Dekker for his thesis ‘ Down & Alzheimer : Behavioural biomarkers of a forced marriage’. During the summer ceremony, Dekker received a prize of €7,500 to spend on his continued academic development.
The Wierenga-Rengerink Prize has been awarded every year since 2015 to the PhD student who wrote the best UG thesis in that year. Each faculty chooses its own winner, after which a jury of former rectors appoints the ultimate winner from this pool. UG alumni fund the Prize through the Ubbo Emmius Fund (UEF).

Ex-students become international alumni ambassadors

The Summer Ceremony is attended by 130 international graduates with dozens of different nationalities. The Ceremony celebrates their graduation and marks the end of their studies in Groningen. A selection of 16 International Alumni Ambassadors, with 15 different nationalities have undergone training in the last six months to represent the UG in their home countries. They will support the UG for a year with international activities for prospective students.