Milestones 2023/2024

Dear EC community members,

The Early Childhood community has had a busy year. We focused on increasing our visibility and reaching everyone who might feel affiliated with ‘early childhood’. We want to take you on a short journey to celebrate our milestones together.

We started last year with a follow-up to our blog workshop. In the end this resulted in two well-read blogs by dr. Madelon Meijer-Hoogeveen and dr. Martijn van Herwijnen.

After our blog workshop in June we also organized a successful network lunch, which we decided to repeat every two months. The network lunches of October and December were a lot of fun. However, we got the feedback that the number of events may be too much. Therefore, we decided to team-up with the other communities and organize a ‘DoY Meet-Up’ every first Tuesday of the month.

The second half of the academic year was focused on fostering collaborations. We collaborated twice with the strategic theme ‘Child Health’ of the UMC Utrecht to organize a DoY Meet-Up. Furthermore, we collaborated with other communities to organize a workshop during the DoY ‘Doing Interdisciplinarity’ event. Finally, we have collaborated with the strategic theme ‘Institutions for Open Societies’ to organize the ILS Language Science Day. Finally, we collaborated with Utrecht Summer School to organize the first Early Childhood Summer School in August.

Besides these events, several departments requested DoY to join their meetings or colloquia to tell more about our goals and aims. The bond between the departments and the EC community is also for the first time used to make our plans for the next academic year during the ‘EC ambassador brainstorm’ in the last week of August. For this brainstorm, members of each department of the UU are invited to discuss their vision for EC for the upcoming year.

Finally, we want to put the spotlight on our wonderful funding recipients. We received excellent applications during both rounds and are very happy to be able to support so many talented researchers. We are currently in the process of assessing the second round of funding applications, who will hear from us soon.

You can review a timeline of our milestones in the image below.