NWO Graduate Programme Grant Awarded to IOPS

IOPS has received a prestigious grant from the NWO Graduate Programme amounting to 800.000 Euros for 4 new PhD scholarships. The aim of the NWO Graduate Programme is to stimulate excellent research and teaching environments for talented young researchers. To reach this goal, the scholarships will be awarded in competition among the best MSc students who started a Research Master program related to IOPS in the current academic year. Students are stimulated to select a supervisor from six designated IOPS research groups, and to come up with a topic of their own choice, according to the following procedure.

IOPS will use a novel recruiting structure in which the conditions of the grant are implemented. In this structure, students who aim to apply for a project scholarship must follow courses or do a brief internship at two universities different from their own, in the first year of their Research Master. At the end of the first year, students must attend a Summer School at which the six designated IOPS groups present their research. Students are then free to select a university, supervisor, and topic of their choice, after which they apply for a scholarship by writing their own research proposal, together with the intended supervisor. An independent committee of IOPS trustees will select the best projects to be pursued as a full Ph.D. project. The scheme below represents the general structure of this process.

Master students from outside IOPS, either in the Netherlands or abroad, can also compete for a PhD scholarship in this procedure. To participate in the selection process, these students also have to (a) follow relevant courses from at least two  universities that participate in this grant, (b) attend the IOPS summer school, and (c) successfully select a supervisor and topic to develop a research proposal. Thus, the selection process is open to a wide variety of students from different backgrounds, who may be enrolled in other Master programs.

The 16 researchers of the six designated IOPS research groups who are eligible as supervisor in this program are: professors Han van der Maas, Denny Borsboom, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers and Andries van der Ark (University of Amsterdam), Iven van Mechelen, Francis Tuerlinckx and Eva Ceulemans (Leuven University), Peter van der Heijden, Herbert Hoijtink, and Ellen Hamaker (Utrecht University), Klaas Sijtsma and Jeroen Vermunt (Tilburg University), Willem Heiser and Jacqueline Meulman (Leiden University), and Henk Kiers and Rob Meijer (University of Groningen).