The winner of the Young eScientist Award 2018 is…

30 Oct 2018 - 2 min

Esther Bron (post-doc researcher at the Biomedical Imaging Group Rotterdam, Erasmus MC) has been awarded the Young eScientist Award 2018.

The prize aims to stimulate a young scientist demonstrating excellence in eScience: the development or application of digital technology to address scientific challenges. The prize will be used to undertake a joint research project, in which Esther will receive support by eScience Research Engineers (experts in the development and application of research software).

Her main research interest is advanced analysis of brain MRI for improving diagnostics. Currently, she is organizing a large international comparison study: The Alzheimer’s Disease Prediction Of Longitudinal Evolution challenge TADPOLE. This challenge objectively compares the performance of methods by international research groups that predict evolution of individuals at risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Her research idea is to develop a user-friendly web-based platform that allows users to apply TADPOLE methods to their own data. She would like to collaborate with the eScience Center to build a web-based platform, to integrate the prediction methods into the platform and to validate them. This will make a different state-of-the-art prediction methods publicly available and easily applicable which is in line with the definition of Open Science.

Esther impressed the reviewers with her track record and the impact she already created on a national and international level. Her proposal also fully embraces open science.

We hope Esther’s research will inspire and encourage other young eScientists to enter next year’s competition!

Photo from left to right: Gennady Roshchupkin (Erasmus UMC), Esther Bron (Erasmus UMC), Meike Nauta (University of Twente) (Photography by Michiel Wijnbergh)