Our Center has come a long way. After several years of diligent work laying the foundation for interdisciplinary collaborations, 2024 marked the successful conclusion of our initial interfaculty funding period. Having learned valuable lessons and built upon our early achievements, we are excited to continue this important initiative. We look forward to together refining our goals and continuing to fulfil the original mission we set out to accomplish.
Some highlights for this year include progress on the DecisionWise smartphone app – once just an ambitious idea, we are proud to report it was recently awarded the ELSA Living Lab for the Future Mental Health Innovation Award. This grant will allow us to develop more aspects of the app, to further our goal of empowering people with a practical, science-based, tool for better decision-making. Center outreach has also taken the form of poster presentations at events like the Radboud Healthy Brain ‘Future of the Mind’ Symposium, the Donders Institute Poster Session and the Behavioural Science Institutes ‘Empowering the Youth’ Symposium.
To connect researchers from across the Center, we have also started a new series of lunch gatherings where each meeting focuses on a different decision-related theme and explores work that addresses different perspectives on this topic, with brief presentations, open discussion, and networking aimed at fostering collaboration and outreach opportunities.
Notably, we also have exciting news about our research progress. For some projects we are celebrating milestones: findings under the line of Social Media Content Moderation have been published and will serve as a base upon which upcoming projects will be built. A Master’s thesis on Bridging the Gap Between Science and Society was successfully defended. Other projects are in full flow, such as the Malicious Web-Designs and Online Trust project; while some are now gaining momentum, such as the Risk Behaviour in a Citylab Sample project. Looking towards 2025 and beyond, we are busy developing several new projects. Thanks to a grant from the Netherlands Academy for Empirical Legal Studies to Sarah Vahed, she will embark on a new experimental research project in collaboration with Pietro Ortolani (Faculty of Law) and Alan Sanfey (Donders Institute), to investigate social media user behaviour, aiming to generate evidence-based recommendations for EU lawmakers working to foster safer online environments.
We also have a new collaborative project with the Donders CityLab starting in a new location: the Brain Museum at the Latijnse School of Nijmegen. This exciting initiative will make use of experience-sampling via an app-based tool to collect data from volunteers over a 7-day period, with participants contributing insights twice daily, helping us work towards our goals of strengthening a meaningful connection between research and our local community.
In addition to our research, to disseminate knowledge we plan to expand our interviews with members from our center and make it a regular feature, sharing key insights through our website and social media. We will also seek to strengthen our connection with local authorities and institutions and promote mutually beneficial collaborations to better address community concerns.
Overall, 2024 has been a year of discovery and growth, dedicated to exploring more ways to bridge academia and society. Every conversation we’ve engaged in, every poster, lecture or workshop we’ve presented, and every research project we’ve supported, have all helped us gain a clearer vision of what it means to serve as a hub for science-based decision-making.
Looking ahead, as our Center continues to grow and mature, we remain committed to uniting our multidisciplinary expertise to generate interesting new avenues for research and positive societal impact. We are excited to collaborate with you in the coming year and look forward to the opportunities that lie ahead!
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