YAG PhD-projects 2017

Saskia Nijmeijer

Learning to preserve: foreign language training as a cognitive vaccine to prevent old-age disorders

Supervisors: Dr. Marie-José van Tol (Faculty Medical Sciences) and Dr. Merel Keijzer (Faculty of Arts)

Mood and cognitive disorders are major contributors to lower quality of life and increased care costs associated with ageing. With the number of senior citizens reaching record levels, attenuating the development of the most prevalent disorders of old age is a major clinical and societal challenge. In this project we will test the hypothesis that learning a new language in older adulthood increases cognitive flexibility, which in turn mediates the vulnerability to develop cognitive or psychiatric disorders associated with old age.

On February 15th, 2023, Saskia defended her PhD thesis 'Flexible Aging: A multidisciplinary approach to learning to preserve'.

Maria (Masha) Medvedeva

Automatic detection of linguistic patterns in legal big data

Supervisors: Dr. Martijn Wieling (Faculty of Arts) and Prof. Michel Vols (Faculty of Law)

For decades, summaries of court judgments were published in written journals, which were not easily accessible for the public. Nowadays, courts publish their judgments online. For example, through www.rechtspraak.nl (NL) or through http://hudoc.echr.coe.int (ECHR). The goal of this project is to automatically identify (linguistic) patterns in this type of legal big data and use these to predict the outcome of the judgments.

On 8 September 2022, Masha defended her thesis 'Identification, Categorisation and Forecasting of Court Decisions'.

Vincent Leeuwenburgh

Novel tools to dissect and monitor tumor metabolism in melanoma patients

Supervisors: Dr. Marthe Walvoort (FSE), Dr. Rudolf Fehrmann (UMCG) and Dr. Hilde Jalving UMCG)

Metastasized melanoma cancer has a historically poor survival rate. Despite impressive recent advances due to the introduction of immunotherapy, most patients with metastatic melanoma still die of their disease. Recent research suggests that altered metabolism in cancer cells is associated with poor patient survival. The goal of this interdisciplinary PhD project is to combine bioinformatics, medical oncology and organic chemistry to understand and perturb cancer metabolism in order to eventually improve treatment strategies.