This year, the Villum Foundation is awarding multimillion-dollar grants to research talents in Denmark from the foundation's Young Investigator Program (YIP) - two of the selected in 2024 come from DTU Aqua, where they deal with respectively the impact of climate change on fish and gelatinous plankton
Two researchers from DTU Aqua, Daniel van Denderen and Cornelia Jaspers, have received grants from the Villum Foundation's Young Investigator Program, YIP, to build research teams and, in the case of Cornelia Jaspers, for an extension of her YIP center 'Gelatinous Plankton Ecology & Evolution'.
The Villum Foundation aims to strengthen technical and scientific research at the Danish universities and this year distributes DKK 134 million from the foundation's Young Investigator Program.
One lucky researcher, Daniel van Denderen, part of Center for Ocean Life, receives DKK 7 million for the project "A new paradigm for describing fish under climate change". In the project, he will investigate what type of strategies for fish growth are successful in different sea areas and how this may change in the coming decades.
And then senior researcher Cornelia Jaspers, who heads the Center for Gelatinous Plankton Ecology & Evolution at DTU Aqua, has received an additional 4 million DKK from Villum YIP+, which is awarded to exceptionally successful YIP recipients. The new project 'The next frontier of Marine Science to mitigate climate change', focuses on climate change in the sea and especially on a gelatinous plankton group, larvaceans, which has been largely ignored until now.
“Recieving the good news from the Villum foundation was a very exciting moment. I felt both honored and enthusiastic realizing that I now have the opportunity to dedicate the next five years to my proposed project,” says Daniel van Denderen and elaborates:
“The possibility of starting a research group is particularly exciting, and I am looking forward to the science we will develop. The grant will enable me to hire a PhD student and a postdoc and will fund a large part of my own time. This will allow me to strengthen my competencies in marine food web ecology and bring me to the forefront of assessing climate impacts on marine ecosystems,” says Daniel van Denderen.”
”This is a big acknowledgement from Villum and I am grateful for their recognition,” Cornelia Jaspers says as she points to the path that now lies open for the Centre for Gelatinous Plankton Ecology & Evolution for the coming years:
”This grant allows me to spearhead some of the initiatives to understand climate change impacts from a new perspective. We have shown that larvaceans, a form of gelatinous zooplankton, can contribute more biomass as fish food than classical food web components. However, only by applying new technologies in combination with models and experiments, we are now at a stage to understand the role of larvaceans in ocean ecosystem functioning and their response to climate change”, concludes Cornelia.
18 young research talents receive a total of DKK 134 million. DKK
Daniel van Denderen is one of four young research talents at DTU who have received a grant from the Villum Young Investigator Program (YIP), and Cornelia has received YIP+ this time.
18 younger researchers receive grants of a total of DKK 134 million. DKK from the Villum Foundation's Young Investigator Program. Villum YIP grants to talented researchers at the beginning of their career to pursue the research questions they are passionate about and build their own research groups, while YIP+ is for the consolidation of successful previous Villum YIP recipients.
See all recipients of the Young Investigators Program and what they are researching.
Congratulations to the grant recipients 😊
Villum Young Investigator Program (YIP)
6-8 million DKK gives to talented younger researchers who establish their own research group for the first time. Applicants must have between to eight years of research experience since the completion of their Ph.D.
The program is announced once a year in an open competition with an application deadline in June. In 2024, 4 DTU researchers have received YIP.
In 2021, the program has been supplemented with a so-called supplementary grant called YIP+, which is to consolidate the research career of the most talented Villum Young Investigators, where 4 million DKK is only applied for a 3-year project period.