Researchers Guus van Dongen, Dick den Hertog and Toby Kiers have been awarded the Impact Award 2023. This Impact Award is presented to renowned researchers who make a meaningful contribution to society. There are three categories: Health, Society and Environment & Climate.

Health category:
Guus van Dongen, professor of medical imaging and biomarkers at Amsterdam UMC, developed new imaging techniques to visualise the behaviour of drugs in the body at the molecular level. ‘What drugs really do in our bodies, we have no idea. Like driving into Amsterdam without navigation.’ One way is to make drugs slightly radioactive so that they light up on a scan: a radioactive TomTom. This could be used in cancer, for example. Van Dongen: ‘As people get older, we are increasingly faced with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. And our brain is pretty locked up, so to get a drug there and make sure it gets there… there are no other options for that than imaging.’ Van Dongen was also the driving force behind the founding of Amsterdam UMC Imaging Center and has found a new challenge at a biotech company where he recently joined: ‘To apply imaging to the whole development path of new drugs so that along the way we can make sure they do what they need to do.’

Category society:
Dick den Hertog, professor of Operations Research at the University of Amsterdam, shows that you can use mathematical optimisation to provide solutions to a wide variety of social problems. Be it optimisation of dike heights in the Netherlands, hospital locations in countries like Timor-Leste and Vietnam or World Food Programme food chains (for which he developed the innovative model Optimus). Now he works for The Ocean Cleanup on optimising the sailing strategy to fish as much plastic out of the ocean as possible in a given time. ‘These are often problems where you have lots of possible decisions to make. Checking all the possibilities with the computer takes a very long time. But with clever mathematical techniques, you can then find the best one within minutes.’ This is why Den Hertog has now set up the Analytics for a Better World Institute. To ensure that research results are really used and have real impact.

Environment & Climate category
Toby Kiers, professor of Evolutionary Biology at VU University Amsterdam, researches underground ecosystems. She discovered that fungi underground behave according to economic principles. They exchange nutrients with the plant roots with which they form symbioses. A high biodiversity helps with this, but it is precisely this biodiversity that is under pressure. ‘Underground ecosystems are in danger of being destroyed. Fungi help limit global warming by sucking carbon into their networks.’ More knowledge about the significance of fungi plays a major role in meeting climate goals. With the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) that Kiers founded, she is encouraging more researchers worldwide in local communities to take samples of underground ecosystems, examine them and understand them. ‘I think most people do understand that the food they eat comes from the ground and is responsible for their health and well-being. But they know much less about how fungi help hold that soil together and move nutrients.’

Marcel Kloosterman (deputy director of IXA UvA-HvA): ‘An enormous amount of high-quality and innovative research is being done at our Amsterdam knowledge institutions. That’s a broad base to have a lot of impact on society. But that impact doesn’t come naturally. For an Impact Award, we look at researchers who make extra efforts. They actively contribute to the actual use of insights and results from their research over a longer period of time. To this end, they cooperate with public and/or private parties and organisations. We see this in all three of these researchers: through their efforts, society benefits from their insights and research results. All three do so on a highly socially relevant topic. This clearly makes them role models for other researchers within the knowledge institutions.’