“EVOLVE”
Where do we come from? One of the oldest and deepest questions for humanity is about the origin of life. This is not just about looking back, but inextricably connected to questions about the world we live in, and our future. Where are we heading? Are we alone in the Universe? Can life cope with self-inflicted phenomena such as climate change and virus pandemics? Driven by fundamental advances in biology, astronomy, physics, and chemistry, we are now making exciting progress, and starting to grasp some details about the origin of life on Earth and beyond.
What is EVOLVE about?
Evolve is all about complex systems and their role in the evolution of life. Firmly embedded in a broad consortium, Evolve has a solid basis to progress efficiently and quickly. This is being done through a combination of four interconnected challenges:
- The origin and co-evolution of life and its host planet,
- The origin of complex life and of ecosystems,
- Predicting the future of life on Earth, and
- The universality of life’s properties across the universe.
Seventeen PhD candidates have taken on the seventeen Evolve projects, and will ultimately contribute to answering big questions around the origin of life.
Participating institutes
The Evolve Fellowship Programme is a joint initiative by six world-leading research institutes of two Dutch universities, University of Groningen and Leiden University:
- Groningen Biomolecular Sciences & Biotechnology Institute
- Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences
- Kapteyn Astronomical Institute
- Leiden Institute of Chemistry
- Stratingh Institute for Chemistry
- Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials
Supervisors
Within Evolve, we have a pool of 20 supervisors. This allows our PhD candidates to collaborate directly with distinguished scholars who have received awards and grants like the Nobel Prize, ERC Advanced Grant, and NWO TOP grant.
Many supervisors have valuable experience as board members or directors of institutes, are members of prestigious organizations like the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) or the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), and/or have advanced knowledge of European networking or training programmes.
Every Evolve supervisor has their own research group and has extensive experience supervising researchers at the PhD and postdoctoral levels in addition to their excellent scientific and managerial experience.
