Prof. Melissa Siegel received the Distinguished Alumna Award from the College of Charleston, USA on 20 November 2021. This award was established to recognise those alumni who have made significant contributions to their professions or to their communities over a long period of time, thus reflecting favourably on the College of Charleston. Prof. Siegel received her Bachelors in Economics with a Minor in Business from the College of Charleston and graduated from the Honors College in 2003. Prof. M...
Our Master’s alumna Claire Tan Sze Eng has won the best thesis award at the Dutch Demography Day 2021 for her dissertation entitled, ‘Returning to a home without a future: The effect of migrant trajectories and experiences on the reintegration of Albanian rejected asylum-seekers’. Based on some 40 in-depth interviews carried out under the EU-funded ADMIGOV project in the first quarter of 2020, the study found strong intersectionality between economic, psychological and security reintegration out...
Our Master’s alumni Vivien Csapliczky (pictured far left) and Job Zomerplaag (pictured far right) have won the biennial ‘Kremers Award’ for having written the best dissertations on regional innovation from a socio-economic perspective. Their theses respectively focused on regional development and digitalisation in southwest Hungary and the (dis)empowerment of community initiatives in the southeast of the Netherlands. Job Zomerplaag, now an editor at Studio Europa Maastricht, said: “Studyin...
Our Master of Science in Public Policy and Human Development (MPP) made it into the Top 20 of the Going BEYOND Award from the ‘Global Business School Network’, a non-profit organisation founded by the World Bank in 2003, based in Washington DC, USA. The award recognises programmes and initiatives that demonstrate a positive impact on society, and that go BEYOND traditional offerings from academic institutions and research journals. In particular, winning entries should show how they: Empower and...
Master’s alumnus Manuj Bhardwaj, a lawyer from India, has been awarded a United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) programme scholarship, 2021-23, from the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation. IPCC Secretary Abdallah Mokssit called the programme “an important step in the fight against climate change enabling the implementation of innovative and efficient solutions”. Manuj is currently pursuing a Doctorate in Law from American University, Washington DC, w...
PhD candidate Mariajose Silva Vargas has been named a Robert S. McNamara Fellow at the World Bank, where she will be hosted for 2021-22 in the Infrastructure and Climate Change unit, part of the Development Impact Evaluation department, in Washington DC, USA. As a large part of her work, Mariajose uses field experiments to address socio-economic questions in countries of the Global South. For example, she is currently running projects in Uganda to study land markets and the socio-economic integr...
PhD alumnus and affiliated researcher Ayo Adedokun was awarded the Leiden University Student platform (LUS) teaching prize, for best lecturer of the year, on 6 September 2021. “Teaching is not merely a profession; it’s a calling,” said Adedokun, who was clearly moved upon receiving the award from the LUS Chair. The prize itself covers 25,000 euros to spend on innovation in teaching and learning, and membership of the University’s Teachers’ Academy. Adedokun started as lecturer at Leiden Universi...
Two researchers from UNU-MERIT have won this year’s Best Paper Award from the Journal of Economic Psychology. The winning article, ‘Gender attitudes in the Arab region – The role of framing and priming effects’ was co-authored by among others Micheline Goedhuys and Eleonora Nillesen. Using survey data to study sensitive topics can lead to biased results. For example, direct survey questions on non-sensitive information, including ownership, already present the challenge of random and systematic ...
Two professors and a Master’s alumna from UNU-MERIT have won the RWB Jackson Award 2021, for the most outstanding English-language article published in the Canadian Journal of Education. The award went to an article entitled, The Use of a Multidimensional Support Model to Examine Policies and Practices for Immigrant Students across Canada, co-authored by Louis Volante, Camila Lara, Melissa Siegel et al. The article sets out the urgent case for ministries and departments to develop a stand-alone ...
Affiliated researcher and PhD alumnus Dr Carlos Cadena Gaitán has been named one of the ‘21 Heroes of 2021’ by the Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative, a global forum co-sponsored by UN-Habitat. Early in the pandemic, while working as Transport Secretary of Medellín in Colombia, Carlos took a leading role in distributing Personal Protective Equipment to the city’s residents, while personally fighting the virus on public transport with disinfectant sprays. But coronavirus was not the only ki...