Promovendi Netwerk Nederland

This afternoon, the Supervisor of the Year award was awarded to Dr. Mónica López López, associate professor at the University of Groningen. PNN awards this prize annually to reward good supervision of PhD candidates. Next to her, Prof. Bert Meijboom (UT) and Prof. Nathaniel Martin (UL) were also nominated for the award, which earned them an honorable mention as excellent supervisors.

Dr. López López stood out for the jury because of the versatility of her supervision. She assists her PhD candidates in various aspects: not only in successfully completing their PhD trajectory, but also in building up a network and gaining relevant experiences. She also pays a lot of attention to their work-life balance and keeps a close eye on the mental health of her PhDs. At the same time, she is not only concerned with the well-being of her own PhDs, but also committed to the overall wellbeing of the PhD community, and is a welcomed speaker at local PhD days.

Dr. López López was honoured to receive the award. She elaborately thanked her PhDs: “If I am any good at supervising, it is mostly because of their kind feedback and the many lessons on academic solidarity that they teach me every day.”

The expert jury, consisting of prof. Eric Eliel (University of Leiden, co-creator Golden Rules of Supervision), prof. Mike Jetten (RU and former winner of the SotY Award), Marishka Neekillappillai (PhD representative University of Leiden and co-creator Golden Rules of Supervision) and Lucille Mattijssen (PNN president), had the difficult task of choosing a winner. Mattijssen: “The quality of the supervisors submitted was very high. We needed a long meeting to determine a winner, but we eventually succeeded. ”

Due to the corona measures, the Supervisor of the Year award was presented digitally in an online ceremony with the nominees and those who nominated them. This ceremony can be viewed here!

The PNN is very pleased with the news about the national open science collaboration between Elsevier and the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU), the Netherlands Federation of University Medical Centers (NFU) and the Dutch Research Council (NWO). Elsevier is the global leader in research publishing and information analytics for (medical) science. The agreement includes services for publishing and reading scientific content, as well as the joint development of innovative open science services

for dissemination and evaluating knowledge. This is a very big step in the field of Open Science and the realization of the ambitions of publishing 100% open access. Read the agreement here.

On May 11th, PNN has officially closed the PNN PhD Survey. Over 1500 PhDs have fully completed this quite long survey! PNN is very happy with the response, which allows us to get a good image of the situation of PhDs in the Netherlands.

Connected to this survey, we held a voluntary lottery for a career coaching session. Due to the large number of participants in this lottery,

PNN has decided to select not two, but three winners of this career coaching session. The winners have been randomly selected and have been informed about this via email (so check your spam box!)

PNN will analyse the data in the coming few weeks and aims to publish a report on the outcomes of the survey before summer.