Author Archives: anneurai

Anne visited a group of curious 4-6 year olds (pre-K, kleuterklas in Dutch) to talk brains! They knew the brain helps you think and feel (for instance when you’re hungry) and that it’s in the head. We learned that there are two big parts of the brain connected by a little bridge to talk withContinue reading “Curious kids learn about the brain”

We are happy to welcome Magdalena Sabat as a postdoc in the lab. She will investigate early warning signals of social tipping points, jointly supervised by Anne and Jan Willem Bolderdijk at the University of Amsterdam. We kicked off Magdalena’s start with several days of brainstorming with an amazing group of collaborators. Welcome!

We had a great time at the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience meeting in Amsterdam, with a satellite meeting on scientists for social good, posters, and a talk. It was great to meet old and new friends and collaborators!

For the first iteration of the new course Psychology of the Climate Crisis, students worked on creative projects to communicate insights they learned to a broader public. Find their creative contributions below!

With panelists Karline Janmaat, Christian Tudorache, Michelle Spierings and Anne Urai, and with Tonko Zijlstra as a moderator, we had an interesting and stimulating discussion about the ethics of animal research. With expertise from ethology to behavioral biology and neuroscience, the discussion touched on issues of research culture, institutional and legal frameworks for animal studies,Continue reading “Panel discussion: ethics of animal research”

We live in times when public trust in science is under threat, misinformation is rife, AI ethics are of increasing concern and climate change is increasingly affecting communities worldwide. How do scientists see ourselves and our role in this world, and can we use our skills for social good? This session will explore ways toContinue reading “Scientists for social good: 2025 satellite event”

Two years after our article ‘Doughnut Academia’, Anne and Clare have posted a new preprint to reflect on where these ideas have brought them – and providing guidelines for others to host their own workshops. See the preprint here https://osf.io/preprints/osf/um47d_v1, and a follow-up interview with eLife here: https://elifesciences.org/interviews/1a08d974/anne-urai-and-clare-kelly

Scientific figures are essential for communicating your research effectively. This guide walks you through the process from raw data to publication-ready figures; and helps separate different phases of the research as we most often carry them out in the lab. Input gathered from a CoCoSys lab meeting in March 2025.