The winners of the 2016 Aarhus University Research Foundation PhD Award

Five talented researchers receive PhD award

Again this year the Aarhus University Research Foundation grants its talent award to five researchers who stand out for the high quality of their scientific work. You can read about them here.

By Filip Graugaard Esmarch

For the 14th time the research foundation is able to present an impressive group of award-winners. Each of the five researchers receive DKK 50,000 for excellent scientific work in connection with their PhD projects, and as will become evident in the following pages this work has led to a series of extraordinary research results.

            Each faculty has recommended a number of new research talents for the award, after which the university and the research foundation together have chosen the most qualified candidates. There is therefore no certainty that all the faculties will be represented in the final group.

            This year’s award-winners comprise a geologist, a doctor, a lawyer, a researcher in English literature and dramaturgy and, finally, an archaeologist. They have each contributed with remarkable new knowledge on ice shield movement in connection with climate change, HIV treatment in West Africa, the principle of loyalty in employment law, compassion in Shakespeare and cultural encounters in archaeological material, respectively.

Facts about the PhD award

  • The Aarhus University Research Foundation established the annual PhD award in connection with the university’s 75th anniversary in 2003.
  • Based on recommendations from the faculties, the directors of the graduate schools at Aarhus University nominate a group of candidates for the award, after which the university management and the Research Foundation make the final nomination.
  • All recipients of the PhD award have completed their PhD project the previous year, in this case in 2015.

 

 

Anne Sophie Haahr Refskou

AFFECT STUDIES - BODILY COMPASSION IN SHAKESPEARE

Anne Sophie Refskou has analysed early modern English drama from a culture-historical perspective on human emotional life.

‘Affect studies is the study of how human emotions emerge, are understood and evaluated. I have focussed exclusively on compassion, which I try to understand in a culture-historical context. With Shakespeare as my main case I study how early modern drama was able to stage, discuss and understand compassion’, PhD Anne Sophie Refskou explains.

‘If we acknowledge that compassion at the time of Shakespeare was considered a completely different emotion than today, we are able to get a deeper understanding of these feelings’.

‘We have a tendency to understand feelings as mental processes. As something that goes on in the head, separate from the body. Therefore, rather than compassion or sympathy we are more likely to talk about empathy. But at the time of Shakespeare the dividing line between the bodily and mental was less rigid than today’, she says. 

According to Anne Sophie Refskou many scientists are seeing evidence that pain at the time of Shakespeare was understood as a potentially collective emotion. That people were able to share pain, not just figuratively, but literally as well.

Sine Grove Saxkjær

CLASSICAL ARCHAEOLOGY - A STRICTLY CONTEXTUAL APPROACH TO THE MATERIAL

Sine Grove Saxkjær has developed a method for identifying cultural and ethnic groups in archaeological source material.

The natives in the Iron Age villages of southern Italy produced their own unique ceramics until about 700 BC, but when the Greek arrived in the area the indigenous population adopted the Greek ceramic style.

‘Previous research has argued for a sudden colonisation and Hellenisation of southern Italy. But if we take a closer look at the material, as we find it, we can see that the indigenous population did in fact continue its unique burial traditions through generations’, says PhD Sine Grove Saxkjær.

The native population may just have realised that the well-turned ceramics of their neighbours was more stylish and easier to make.

‘So what do you do when no written sources exist? You must try to find evidence of other forms of practice in the archaeological material. This could be anything from burial rituals to everyday routines. They are harder to find, but it is possible if you take a strictly contextual approach to the material’, Sine Grove Saxkjær says.

In her thesis she therefore provides a tangible method for doing so. And she is currently working on optimising this approach as part of her postdoc position at the Danish Institute in Rome.

Anders Damsgaard

GLACIER RESEARCH - THE ICE'S AQUAPLANING ACCELLERATES THE RISE IN SEA LEVELS 

By simulating the movements of the ice on a non-solid foundation Anders Damsgaard has fuelled the most pessimistic predictions on the rise of the oceans.

Anders Damsgaard is a glacier scientist and amateur computer scientist. For many years he has been fascinated with climate change. And due to man-made climate changes the subject has now become eerily topical. Because what are the actual conditions in Antarctica and Greenland?

‘Satellite records show that the fastest ice flow by far is found in the relatively few places where the ice is not kept in place by mountains, but moves across former sediments.

Because these sediments are mechanically weak, and the water pressure on the bottom is high, the ice almost aquaplanes across the surface’.

‘I tried to think of the sediment in the simplest way possible – as tiny grains of sand that interact with each other. I simulated their movement on the computer to test the conditions we expect exist under the ice. And my simulation shows that the sediments’ ability to slow down the ice is limited. When the limit to the possible friction of the foundation is reached, the ice will soon accelerate into the warm ocean’, Anders Damsgaard predicts. He will continue his glacier research in a postdoc position at the University of California in San Diego.

Sanne Jespersen

HIV TREATMENT - REGULAR TREATMENT IS KEY

HIV patients in West Africa often discontinue their treatment, increasing the risk of resistance. Therefore, it is important to provide the patients with better information.

So far most studies of HIV treatments have been done in the Western world, and the transfer of research results to Africa has been somewhat indiscriminate. In Guinea Bissau Doctor Sanne Jespersen has conducted randomised treatment studies, comparing the effects of two types of treatments.

‘In Guinea Bissau the patients often discontinue their treatment for various reasons. Therefore, our aim was to examine whether a so-called PI-based regimen would be better suited than the commonly used NNRTI-based regimens, as PI-based regimens are known to be more resistant to the development of resistance due to discontinued treatment’.

‘The results were frightening. We found that none of the two types of medicine were particularly effective, probably because the patients had not taken the medicine as instructed’, she concludes.

‘The study has shown that the key thing is not whether the pill is blue or yellow. It is to better inform the patients to take their medicine as instructed. Then the specific type of medicine is less important. The patients need to understand the importance of taking their medicine every day, even if they do not feel sick’, says Sanne Jespersen.

Natalie Videbæk Munkholm

EMPLOYMENT LAW - APPLIES TO ALL EMPLYMENT LEGAL RELATIONS

Based on extensive empirical material Natalie Videbæk Munkholm has studied the duty of loyalty as a universal principle within employment law.

Natalie Videbæk Munkholm’s PhD project ’Loyalty in employment legal relations’ is the first Danish thesis to fully explore the significance of this concept within employment law. The principle is far from new. But it had to be embedded in a theoretical framework and subjected to empirical study.

‘It was necessary to consider how we, through an empirical frame of reference, can determine rights and duties with regard to loyalty under the conditions of employment, both in individual employment and between public organisations’, Natalie Videbæk Munkholm concludes.

Based on the legal philosophy of critical legal positivism she created an original analysis method based on three types of legal principles, enabling her to study the duty of loyalty based on the same framework and in all employment legal relations. This method further enabled her to establish a set of criteria concerning the duty of loyalty across practice, and made it possible for the first time to compare aspects of the individual and public duty of loyalty.

Her analyses are based on a survey of more than 100 years of legal practice and literature on loyalty and similar conflicts.