Hestia grant to appoint refugee to NTR project

CID researchers Prof. dr. Dorret Boomsma, dr. Eveline de Zeeuw and dr. Elsje van Bergen were awarded a Hestia NWO grant to appoint Hekmat Alrouh MD to a 2-year research project. He was one of nine refugees who received the Hestia grant.

“Hestia –  Impulse for Refugees in Science” is a pilot programme to fund research appointments for academics residing in the Netherlands as refugees and wishing to build or continue an academic career here . Researchers that are already funded by NWO or ZonMw can use this pilot programme to fund the appointment of a refugee to their project.

At the Netherlands Twin Register (NTR), Hekmat will work on ‘The impact of parental genes on offspring health: nurture via nature’. Children from low socioeconomic families are at higher risk of poor health. This could be due to growing up in poverty, to transmitted genetic liability, or both. Hekmat will use a new “genetic nurture” design to explore how parents influence children’s health via genes and the environment. The NTR based research group highlighted the usefulness of this genetic nurturing design in a recent preprint on the intergenerational transmission of education and ADHD.