Rubicon travel grant for two young NIOO researchers
Barbara Tomotani and Jasper Wubs, who both completed their PhD thesis last year based on research done at NIOO, are among the twenty winners of a Dutch Rubicon grant. The grants give young researchers the opportunity to do research at leading institutes abroad.
To find out more about the present, you sometimes have to go back into the past. That's no news to Barbara Mizumo Tomotani, who completed her PhD thesis last year on the impact of climate change on the seasonal cycle of the European pied flycatcher.
Does Polly really want a cracker?
Key questions were how resilient the birds are, and how much time they might need to adapt. Other recent NIOO research demonstrated that sometimes, such changes can take place in a surprisingly short timespan: "evolution in action", as in the case of British great tits evolving longer beaks thanks to Britons' enthusiasm for feeding them.
Changes to beak shape are also a key part of Barbara Tomotani's successful Rubicon proposal. Titled 'Does Polly really want a cracker', the proposal suggests looking at beak shapes and isotopes of birds preserved in museum collections in order to gain insight into the ways they may have adapted.
According to Tomotani, the research she is proposing "could be of great interest when it comes to protecting and conserving species worldwide." Thanks to the Rubicon grant, she will be able to spend 16 months at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
Food security in developing countries
Like Barbara Tomotani, Jasper Wubs completed his PhD in 2017 based on research done for the most part at or under the aegis of NIOO. In Wubs' case, he focused on soil transplantation, an approach to nature restoration that NIOO has helped to pioneer.
Wubs' thesis asked what role soil life may play in 'steering' the composition of the plant community in areas where nature is being restored. His Rubicon proposal continues along the same lines, but instead of looking at nature areas being restored it looks specifically at food production.
In developing countries in particular, Wubs stresses, food security is a major issue. So can soil life be used to bring degraded soils in these countries back to health, increasing their productivity? Wubs' Rubicon grant will allow him to work on this question for a period of two years at ETH Zürich, Sustainable Agroecosystems in Switzerland.
About Rubicon
The Rubicon programme of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) is aimed at giving young, highly promising researchers the opportunity to gain international research experience.
In total, 88 researchers took part in this first funding round of the year. That means roughly one in five was successful. By the end of this year, sixty young researchers will have been awarded a Rubicon grant.
In addition to Switzerland and New-Zealand, successful applicants are planning to go to Norway, Singapore, Germany and Britain. But the most popular destination is the United States: out of the 20 successful proposals, 9 were for institutions in the US.
