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2.5 million ERC Advanced grant for Patti Valkenburg
Patti Valkenburg has been awarded an Advanced Investigators Grant by the European Research Council (ERC) for her research project: "The entertainization of Childhood: An etiology of risks and opportunities." This is the most prestigious European award for individual researchers.

The granted research project aims to investigate the effects of children’s use of entertainment media (e.g., DVDs, computer games) on their cognitive abilities, anti-social behavior, and ADHD. In her earlier work, Valkenburg has often found that children differ greatly in their susceptibility to media effects. To investigate this assumption more systematically, she developed a media-effects model in which she identifies three types of individual susceptibility to media effects: Dispositional susceptibility (i.e., susceptibility due to genetic make-up and/or temperament), developmental susceptibility (susceptibility due to developmental level), and social susceptibility (i.e., susceptibility due to environmental influences).

Valkenburg will use the € 2.5 million to form a new interdisciplinary research group within CCAM, including communication scientists, geneticists, and developmental psychologists. Her great ambition is to finally truly understand media effects on children and to bring real scholarly advancement to this tremendously difficult field.

The ERC Advanced Grant targets leading scientists in Europe. Granted projects are believed to lead to pioneering and far-reaching challenges at the frontiers of different fields, and involve new, ground-breaking or unconventional theories and methodologies, whose risky outlook is justified by the possibility of a major breakthrough with an impact beyond a specific research discipline.

12 ERC panel members, and 6 external reviewers evaluated Valkenburg’s project and track record; both received the highest possible marks.

More information on Patti Valkenburg's research can be found on the website of the Center for research on Children, Adolescents and the Media (CCAM).

Center for Political Communication Debate: Immigration in the media
On 30 November the Center for Pollitical Communication (CPC) organizes a debate on the portayal of immigration in the Dutch media. Participants include the prominent Dutch politicians Rita Verdonk (Trots op Nederland) and Femke Halsema (GroenLinks), journalists Xandra Schutte (De Groene Amsterdammer), Arendo Joustra (Elsevier), and scientists prof. dr Stefaan Walgrave (Universiteit Antwerpen) en prof. dr Wouter van der Brug (UvA).

The debate takes place in the Heeren XVII-zaal Oost-Indisch Huis, Kloveniersburgwal 48, Amsterdam, on Monday, 30th November at 15.30. Please note that it is no longer possble to register, as the room is now fully booked.

More information in Dutch

Rens Vliegenthart receives VENI  grant from NWO
Rens Vliegenthart has received a NWO VENI grant for his proposal ‘The contingency of media's impact on national parliaments: a comparative study'. A Veni grant is part of the science foundatiuon’s Vernieuwingsimpuls and is reserved for top-10% researchers in their generation.

Claes de Vreese Vice Chair ICA Political Communication Division
Claes de Vreese will start as Vice Chair and later Chair of the Political Communication Division of the ICA. Claes was elected in the fall ICA elections. His term starts at the end of the ICA Singapore conference in June 2010.

Patti Valkenburg associate editor HCR
Patti Valkenburg has been appointed associate editor of Human Communication Research. HCR is one of the five official journals of the International Communication Association. It is a top-ranked communication journal and one of the top journals in the field of human communication.

ASCoR Baschwitz Awards for Andreas Schuck and Jochen Peter
On June 22nd, Jochen Peter received the ASCoR Baschwitz Faculty Award for the best article published in a peer-reviewed journal in 2008. The award was given for his article co-authored with Patti Valkenburg "Adolescents’ exposure to sexually explicit Internet material and sexual preoccupancy: A three-wave panel study" (Media Psychology, 11, 207-234).

At the same time, Andreas Schuck received the ASCoR Baschwitz Young Researcher Award for the best article published in a peer-reviewed journal in 2008 first-authored by a PhD candidate. The jury awarded him for an article which was part of his PhD dissertation which he defended at the UvA earlier this year, and which he co-authored with Claes de Vreese: "The Dutch No to the EU Constitution: Assessing the role of EU skepticism and the campaign" (Journal of Elections, Public Opinion & Parties, 18(1), 101-128).

ICA Young Scholar Award for Jochen Peter
Jochen Peter recently received the 2009 Young Scholar Award of the International Communication Association (ICA). This award is given to one scholar each year who has not only contributed to communication knowledge in a sustained and rigorous fashion, but who has also displayed the kind of potential for continued development that promises to produce an outstanding research record over time. ICA honored Jochen during the Presidential Address at the ICA conference in Chicago in May.

Stijn Reijnders wins Top Paper Award
The Popular Communication Division of the ICA awarded Stijn Reijnders for a Top Paper Award at the annual ICA conference in Chicago, May 22-25. The awarded paper, part of his VENI-project on 'Media Tourism', is entitled "Places of the imagination. An ethnography of the TV detective tour".

Academy Assistant Grant
Karolina Tutaj receives Academy Assistant Grant to work with Eva van Reijmersdal Karolina Tutaj, an excellent Research Master student at the UvA Graduate School of Communication, received an Academy Assistant Grant to work with dr. Eva van Reijmersdal. This grant offers Karolina the opportunity to participate in Van Reijmersdal's research at ASCoR for one day per week during the second year of her Research Master program. Van Reijmersdal will be Tutaj's supervisor in two projects on advertising literacy and audience understanding of brand placement.

The competition for the grant was fierce, as only twelve grants were available for the entire Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. The grant is provided by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Scienes and by the University of Amsterdam. The aim of the grant is to stimulate talented students to do scientific research and to improve their research skills.

Peter Neijens Best Reviewer IJA
Peter Neijens has been chosen as the winner of the International Journal of Advertising (IJA) Best Reviewer of 2008 Award for his excellent work in reviewing for the IJA.

Science foundation grant to Claes de Vreese
The Danish Social Science Foundation has awarded Claes de Vreese for survey data collection around the 2009 European Parliamentary elections. The grant will be used within the broader VICI and PIREDEU projects which are supported by the NWO and the EU’s FP7 program.