The research of professor Evangelos Kanoulas focuses on the one hand on building smart algorithms that take into account the specific needs of an individual user, and on the other hand on evaluating the quality of these algorithms: how good are the search results? Are there any biases?

Gosling is a world-renowned expert in tropical pollen and environmental change during the Quaternary (last 2.6 million years). In his research and education, Gosling seeks to place current issues related to climate change into a broad perspective by studying changes in the environment in the prehistoric past. During his professorship, Gosling will continue expanding his research to areas and time frames relevant to how ancient human societies have shaped their environment.

Fernández’ main area of expertise is to study complex aspects of human language use and see how these can be translated into the digital dialogue models that are for instance used by chatbots and artificial personal assistants. With this, the research of her group takes place at the interface of computational linguistics, cognitive modeling and artificial intelligence.

Colijn’s research focuses on the physics of elementary particles in the universe. In particular, he is interested in the mysterious dark matter. Researchers know that this type of matter exists in the universe, but what it consists of is still unclear. With the aid of major international collaborations such as the particle detector XENONnT, Colijn attempts to figure out which particles are responsible for the dark matter that we observe everywhere in the universe.

Verbeek's research and teaching focus on the relationship between humans and technology, viewed from an ethical perspective. He is one of the six principal investigators of a 10-year research program on the Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies (ESDiT). And as of October 2022, the Supervisory Board of the University of Amsterdam has named Peter-Paul Verbeek (1970) Rector Magnificus and member of the Executive Board of the UvA.

Kandhai focuses on quantitative finance and complex systems. His primary research interests are hereby on the use of data-driven microscopic simulations as a way to understand the complex behaviour of financial markets, and how to include the driving mechanisms in multi-scale models for derivatives pricing and risk management.

Check the full list of professorial appointments, including the special appointments.