Carlo Cavicchia, Carlos Riumallo Herl, and Daniel Urban awarded with SSH-XS grant

Proposal of Carlo Cavicchia: Seeing How Cities Move: A New Tool for Understanding Urban Mobility

Every day, millions of people move through cities, shaping congestion, accessibility, and equity. Yet urban planners lack clear visual tools to understand these movements when data are incomplete. In his project, Assistant Professor Carlo Cavicchia will develop a new statistical open-source tool that transforms observed travel flows into intuitive maps showing functional city structure rather than physical distance. The approach is designed to work reliably with large, fragmented mobility data. The results will include applied case studies on real cities and scientific publications. By making urban mobility patterns visible and interpretable, this project will support smarter transport, fairer access, and more sustainable cities.

Proposal of Carlos Riumallo Herl: Understanding and Overcoming Low Preventive Medication Adherence in Pregnancy Associate 

Professor Carlos Riumallo Herl will examine why people often do not follow recommended preventive treatments and how simple interventions can improve adherence. Using a carefully designed experiment, it tests strategies such as reminders, information on benefits, and involvement of family members to understand the behavioural factors that influence whether individuals take medications consistently. The study aims to reveal how behavioural biases, like focusing on immediate costs or underestimating long-term benefits, affect health decisions. The findings will inform scalable interventions to improve adherence across a range of medications and preventive treatments, with potential to enhance health outcomes in low-resource settings worldwide.

Proposal of Daniel Urban: Democratising Private Markets? Exploring Europe’s Push to Open Private Investing

Rising wealth inequality in advanced economies partly reflects unequal access to high-return private investments, such as private equity and infrastructure. The European Long-Term Investment Fund (ELTIF) is a new EU vehicle that allows households to invest in these traditionally exclusive assets. The project of Associate Professor Daniel Urban asks whether ELTIFs genuinely broaden access or mainly expose small investors to high fees and complex risks. He will build the first comprehensive dataset on ELTIFs to document their costs, investment choices, and returns compared with standard funds. The results will inform debates on inequality, consumer protection, and how to channel household savings into the real economy.

About the NWO Open Competition SSH-XS grants

In 2022, the NWO (Dutch Research Council) launched the NWO Open Competition SSH call. This Call is allocated in three different grants, of which the XS grant is specifically intended to encourage curiosity-driven and bold research that involves the relatively rapid exploration of a promising idea. The research projects are ground-breaking and high risk-high gain. Most important is that the result of each project contributes to the advancement of science.