We are pleased to present three nominees for the Young eScientist Award 2018!

15 Oct 2018 - 3 min

Every year, the Netherlands eScience Center awards 50.000 EUR of eScience expertise to a young and ambitious researcher. Applicants have to be true collaborators who apply or develop research software to solve challenging research questions in their discipline. This year the applicants are also asked how their novel research idea contributes to scientific research beyond their project.

The nominees are invited to give a short pitch at the conference dinner of the 14th IEEE eScience Conference on Tuesday 30 October 2018, after which the winner will be announced.

Meike Nauta – University of Twente

Meike Nauta, recently graduated, has opened an impactful research line at the University of Twente: Using machine learning to discover causal relationships in time series data. Meike would like to collaborate with eScience Center to design and implement a deep learning framework that distinguishes between correlation and causation such that we can visualize and interpret the learnt thought process of a deep learning model to discover causal relationships in observational data. She proposes to apply the developed deep learning framework to real-life EEG data available at the University of Twente to discover the start of an epileptic seizure, which would help to develop pre-notification devices.

Gennady Roshchupkin – Erasmus University Medical Center

Gannady, Postdoctoral Researcher at Erasmus MC, has developed a Hase framework which dramatically reduces computational time for high-dimensional genome-wide association study (GWAS) from years to only hours and implemented a new meta-analytical approach, which requires just several gigabytes to be exchanged between collaborators, compare to terabytes in conventional methods. He would like to collaborate with the eScience Center to make HASE more scalable, faster, user-friendly and extend current functionality. Gennady believes that such open source frameworks, as HASE, contribute to the spread of open science philosophy making science more transparent and accessible for everyone.

Esther Bron – Erasmus University Medical Center

Esther Bron is post-doc researcher at the Biomedical Imaging Group Rotterdam, Erasmus MC. 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.