Word from the directors

Amsterdam Neuroscience provides common ground for clinicians and basic scientists in the field of neuroscience in the Amsterdam area in the Netherlands. The institute helps to support excellent and outstanding neuroscience research and showcases its outcome and societal impact. In the six years under review in this self-evaluation report (2016-2021), researchers of the Amsterdam Neuroscience community have published approximately 7,995 peer-reviewed papers and have acquired more than €346 million research funding. This has led to groundbreaking translational research and clinical trials all within the field of neuroscience. Researchers from all disciplines within our research institute have contributed to major, world-leading innovation addressing the brain in both health and disease. We have also provided an excellent graduate training environment for the 523 PhD candidates that were embedded in Amsterdam Neuroscience and that graduated between 2016-2021.

However, the past few years have been challenging. In February 2020, Diederik van de Beek was on the phone with several biotech companies, drawing attention and alerting them to the new SARS-CoV-2 virus (what we now call COVID-19) and asking them to consider repurposing their work and innovations in the fight against it. Around the same time, in the Amsterdam Neuroscience office, we chose the research institute’s central theme for 2020 to be ‘Team Science’, which is one of the pillars of Amsterdam UMC. We had no way of knowing just how spot-on that concept – and just how great the need for it – would be within a short matter of months. Around March 13, 2020, the first wave of COVID-19 patients hit our hospitals and all research units were brought to a halt by the lockdown of our labs and offices, while several of us kept on wholeheartedly fighting for the lives of patients in the hospital. This was something that not only hit our hospital and research units, but society as a whole, on a global level.

As 2020 drew to a close, we looked back at, what had proved to be, an incredibly intense year. A year of numerous team efforts. This contemplation on the year we had left behind also brought an optimistic outlook for the near future. It was, without a doubt, a year of team science for our institute. That year also showed our ability to be resilient. And with that in mind, we picked ‘Resilience’ as the central theme for 2021. A theme that addresses plenty of specialisms within the neuroscience field: from the psyche and the capability to adjust to new and stressful situations to the fundamental science and the adaptive brain cells.

With the COVID-19 pandemic continuing through 2021, our leaders in the academia participated intensely in the public debate, but at the same time, they worried about the social isolation in which the younger generation had to endure the semi-lockdown. It meant another year in which we studied, worked and met each other online, during webinars. Fortunately, in October 2021 we were able to organize the Amsterdam Neuroscience Annual Meeting as a hybrid event in which we celebrated the accomplishments within Amsterdam Neuroscience and benchmark the tradition of our open academic culture.

The central motto of Amsterdam Neuroscience is: ‘Connecting the people, the science and the brain’. The good-spirited way in which teams of neuroscientists kept presenting themselves in interviews, in webinars and at our Annual Meetings reflects both the resilience and the ‘can-do’ attitude that became an increasingly driving force in how neuroscience is done!

Arjen Brussaard current executive director

Diederik van de Beek former co-director

Guus Smit current co-director and future executive director

Yolande Pijnenburg current co-director

Marten Smidt current co-director