Riet Groenen was able to spend almost a year in Fiji for her thesis research on fertility and family planning thanks to donations from funds. Her studies, research experience and focus earned her a job at the United Nations. Groenen dedicated her career to women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights, and to ending violence against women.

Our annual project grant round this year attracted unprecedented interest: we received an impressive 107 applications – a marked increase compared with last year. Behind each application is a Leiden researcher with a special story. We spoke to three researchers who were granted an award and can now carry out their plans.

Retired Major General Rob Nypels (88) has donated a sizeable sum to the Nypels-Tans PTSD Fund that he himself established – one of the ‘named funds’ at the Leiden University Fund – to promote interdisciplinary research into psychotraumatology. The main aim is to research the effect of new treatments and thus improve the care for veterans and members of the armed forces.

On 14 January 2019, Shermarke Hassan boarded a plane to Milan. This young PhD candidate was going to spend the next three months doing research at the ‘Angelo Bianchi Bonomi Hemophilia and Thrombosis Centre,’ one of the world’s biggest research and treatment centres for haemophilia, a rare condition that affects the blood’s ability to clot.

Behind each named fund is a special story, but it is not often that, having already set up two very personal funds, a donor chooses to make a third contribution to Leiden’s research. In the Faculty Club Dining Room, donor and alumnus Hans van der Valk signed the agreement establishing the ‘Lingling Wiyadharma Fund for the Practice of the Natural Sciences’.