Three researchers from UMCG and one from the university of Groningen are part of a consortium of scientists that has been awarded a 19.6 million euro grant from the Dutch Research Council (NOW) for the research project “Stress-In-Action”.
The project is led by the VU University Amsterdam and features researchers also from Amsterdam UMC, Erasmus MC and the University of Twente.
The Groningen-based scientists – Ute Bültmann (Professor of Work & Health), Harold Snieder (Professor of Genetic Epidemiology), Els Maeckelberghe (Associate Professor in Bioethics and Research Ethics) and Peter de Jonge (Professor of Developmental Psychology) – will help develop new methods to monitor and reduce stress in daily life.
The project, going from understanding and measuring to interventions and the impact on health, strives to prevent the development of stress-related illnesses and to finally impact positively the health and well-being of the population.
According to Stress-In-Action’s website, while stress has become a buzzword today, our understanding of it is very limited and a strict definition has not been codified yet.
Research so far has mainly focused on laboratory studies, animal models and sometimes on one-time assessments of stressful events and experiences, which leave a huge gap in the understanding of “what determines stress in our daily life, how we can quantify it, what the temporal dynamics of the various stress responses are, how they are moderated by person-specific characteristics, and how stress responses drive the onset and course of stress-related disease”.
The grant was awarded by the NOW research program “Gravitation”, which gives money to consortia of scientists to participate in groundbreaking research. Gravitation is one of the ways the Dutch government stimulates research in the Netherlands.
