ERC Starting Grants for two UvA researchers

The European Research Council (ERC) has this year awarded Starting Grants to Maarten Marsman and Federico Savini of the UvA's Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. Their projects deal with the statistical analysis of psychological networks and the regulatory changes needed for a circular degrowth economy, respectively. An ERC Starting Grant is a personal grant of about €1.5 million and provides support to talented researchers for a period of five years. Maarten Marsman (Psychological Methods): A New Bayesian Foundation for Psychometric Network Modelling (Bayesian P-Nets) . Psychologists use networks to explain patterns in our cognitive development and the onset of mental problems. They assume that these patterns develop in a complex system of interacting psychological variables and use network analysis to estimate these interactions from empirical data. This idea has caught on, and the psychological network literature grows exponentially.