WUN in short

The most talented researchers and educators are ever more dispersed globally. Capitalizing on this, WUN brings together major universities that sit in widely diverse geographical and cultural contexts, forming a partnership that brings an unparalleled diversity and richness of talent and resources to bear on major research problems.

Through its Research Development Fund, WUN supports collaborative research that addresses major global challenges:

• Responding to Climate Change
• Public Health
• Global Higher Education and Research
• Understanding Cultures

Within each of these Global Challenge areas, researchers from partner universities collaborate on a range of focused problems.

WUN also invests in education. At graduate level, the WUN provides opportunities for early-career researchers, including postgraduate and postdoctoral students, to broaden their professional networks and gain specialized experience in an international context. At undergraduate level, WUN promotes initiatives that bring students from multiple partner universities together for shared research experience.

  Maastricht University is pleased to be part of the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN). It gives us a unique opportunity to connect with a selected number of international network universities who share our vision on research and education, while at the same time staying connected to their own region. The research focus of WUN matches very well with the strategic themes of Maastricht University. Our WUN membership enhances our global engagement and our aim and commitment to contribute to the global sustainable development agenda. 

Prof. Dr. Rianne Letschert
Maastricht University President and UM representative in the WUN Partnership Board​

WUN Research Development Fund

WUN encourages international collaborative research among its members via its Research Development Fund (RDF). The RDF aims at bringing together researchers to undertake innovative, high quality, research projects that addresses the one of the global challenges on which the WUN focuses.

Calls for proposals for the RDF fund are launched annually, usually in August and with a deadline at the end of October. The call for 2022/2023 will be launched in August 2022. For more information, please refer to the WUN website. For additional questions you can contact Han Aarts.

RDF projects led by UM researchers as ‘principal investigator (PI)’ in the past years include: 

• the creation of a Community of Learning for African PhD fellows (2015; Dr Mindel van de Laar),
• a project on urban solid waste management (2018; Prof. Shyama Ramani and Maria Tomai from UNU-MERIT) 
• a project on developing a platform to share accelerometer data (2018; Dr. Annemarie Koster at FHML (CAPHRI).
• Women and Migration: patterns, experiences, vulnerabilities (2019; Dr Katie Kuschminder)
• Strengthening Antenatal Care Resilience in the face of pandemics (2020; Dr Elena Ambrosino)
• A project on research supervision and mentoring practices during te Covid 19 Pandemic and beyond (2021; Dr Mindel van de Laar and Ms. Oksana Celbis)

  Information about all of these projects can be found here.

Peter Peters

Peter Peters is UM’s first distinguished university professor. This professor in Nanobiology will help the university to pursue its ambitions in the fields of sciences and imaging. This ‘Limburg Chair’ is supported by the Province of Limburg in an effort to foster valorisation in collaboration with the business sector and communication with a wide audience.

Peters studies the immune system at a nanomolecular level, with the aim of gaining greater insight into the development of different forms of cancer and infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. At UM, he will establish the Institute of Nanoscopy. Peters obtained his PhD in Utrecht and has since spent his career improving fundamental knowledge of the functioning of cells at the nano level, first in the US and for the last 15 years at the Netherlands Cancer Institute/Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital in Amsterdam. Peter Peters is also co-director of the Maastricht MultiModal Molecular Imaging Institute (M4I), together with Ron Heeren.

In addition to his research, Peters will be involved in teaching at UM. In his previous posts at the universities of Utrecht and Amsterdam, he was named ‘lecturer of the year’ three times. 

For more information, please visit the M4I Division of Nanoscopy website. 

Ron Heeren

Ron Heeren was appointed distinguished university professor and Limburg Chair in the field of molecular imaging with an inter-faculty research programme. Heeren has been working successfully on innovative molecular imaging techniques, including the ‘mass microscope’. With the mass microscope, researchers are able to directly, quickly and with precision determine in a single experiment the location and identity of thousands of molecules on cells and tissue samples. This diagnostic information is critical for personalized medicine, which is the healthcare of the future. 

Heeren obtained his PhD on plasma-surface interactions at the University of Amsterdam in 1992. After working as a postdoctoral researcher on mass spectrometry for two years, he joined the MOLART research group at the FOM institute of AMOLF (part of the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research, NWO). Four years later he started a research group focusing on the development of mass spectrometry imaging. A large part of this research group is making the move with him to Maastricht. He was appointed professor at the Faculty of Chemistry in Utrecht in 2001. Ron Heeren is also co-director of the Maastricht MultiModal Molecular Imaging Institute (M4I), together with Peter Peters.

For more information, please visit the M4I Division of Imaging Mass Spectrometry website.

Clemens van Blitterswijk

Professor Van Blitterswijk specialises in bone and cartilage repair, with a particular focus on developing new technologies for regenerative medicine. These include “smart" biomaterials that lead to tissue regeneration through the patient’s own stem cells. He will be operating within the new MERLN Institute.

A member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), Van Blitterswijk was recently named the most entrepreneurial scientist in the Netherlands. Besides research he will also be involved in teaching; he is the editor of a popular textbook, Tissue engineering, re-released in a revised edition by Academic Press in 2014.

For more information, please visit the MERLN Institute website.

Michel Dumontier

Michel Dumontier is a distinguished university professor in the field of Data Science. His research aims to develop computational methods for scalable integration and reproducible analysis of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data across scales - from molecules, tissues, organs, individuals, populations to the environment. His group leverages semantic web technologies with machine learning and network analysis to tackle challenging problems in the areas of drug discovery and precision medicine. Dr Dumontier will lead a new Institute for Data Science that will act as a focal point for data science research and teaching across the University.

  For more information please visit the Institute of Data Science website or read the press release.