Martienke Baaij receives the “Kees Bakker Award”
Leiden Biology student Martienke Baaij received the annual award for being the best BSc-student in 2017 from the “Stichting Professor Dr. K. Bakker-fonds”.
Martienke Baaij received the “Kees Bakker award” on Friday the 20th of April from Professor Eddy van der Meijden in the presence of Director of Education Bachelor programme: Arthur Ram. The jury was impressed by her strong motivation for a career aimed at applying fundamental and applied scientific knowledge and methods to make a contribution to long-term preservation of ecosystem functions of our natural environment.
The award consists of a certificate of qualification and €1500,- which Martienke Baaij should invest in her career for an international research internship. The prize is awarded every year to the best BSc-student in Biology in Leiden with the highest grades and ambition to specialise in evolutionary or ecological studies.
The award allows Baaij to improve her English speaking skills by following an academic speaking skills course. “I also want to follow an internship abroad about (plant)ecology, maybe in combination with nature conservation, climate change or molecular techniques”.- says Martienke
About Kees Bakker
Kees Bakker retired as Professor in Animal Ecology in 1991 after 41 years at the Institute of Evolutionary and Ecological Sciences (which merged in 2009 with the Institute of Molecular Plant Sciences into the Institute of Biology Leiden) and passed away in 2010. He was investigator of ecological competition among insect species, a vivid proponent of the evolutionary approach and wrote a well-known text book on ecology in Dutch. This discipline of study is continued at the Institute of Biology Leiden today by several investigators of plant and insect ecology; see for example the personal pages of the following investigators and teachers: Klaas Vrieling, Tom de Jong, Maurijn van der Zee, Peter Klinkhamer and Daniel Rozen.