UARC Newsletter December
UARC is proudly presenting our last newsletter of 2025! This was our first year to send out monthly newsletters! If you have any feedback we would love to hear it: Send us an email (research@ua.aw) or fill out a short anonymous form.
Between 16 December and 5 January we are taking time off and will take longer to respond to emails! We hope you have a lovely festive period: Bon Pasco!
Overview of the year
This year, UARC:
Organized 10 workshops and 2 events on the use of our Repository, Open Data, Interdisciplinary Collaboration, Evidenced-Based CVs, Python, The Turing Way, Aruba’s Youth Needs, and more!
Organized 14 writing sprints, ensuring accountability and productivity in the research writing process!
Added over 500 outputs to the Open Knowledge Repository, adding to the 877 outputs available in 2024. We now have over 1300 outputs available in the Repository!
Assisted with the submission of over 10 research proposals, as well as providing support with the NWO PhD in the Caribbean call, and successfully obtained funding (such as JUSTArt, DCDC-Network, ABC-NHC - see below!).
Coordinated 10 Research Committee meetings, amongst others resulting in setting up a Research Ethics Committee at the UA in 2026!
Worked on 9 posters of our Researchers. All 16 posters will be on the walls at the university in 2026 and are already available on our Repository.
Set up a community on Zenodo and a GitHub organization for software repositories.
Started with PhD Lunches that are open to anyone from Aruba pursuing or interested in pursuing a PhD! We organized three so far, and are planning to continue this on a monthly basis in the upcoming year. Are you interested in joining? Let us know by sending an email to research@ua.aw!
Professionalized our organization further, with Pauline starting as our Data Privacy officer in 2026, and signing the Support for Open Infrastructure Statement and the Declaration of Research Assessment!
Reminder! UARC event Tomorrow! Learn Python - Unlock Data
Interested in learning how to code and use Python for your data analysis? UARC is working together with the University of the Virgin Islands (Ayishih Bellew) for two Python workshops! Sign up today (8 December) and attend the workshop tomorrow!
Beginner workshops, no experience or dataset needed!
Instruction language is English, questions may also be asked in Papiamento/Dutch
Attending the workshop is free!
You will need to bring a laptop, as this is a hands-on workshop
The session on 11 December will build on the session from 9 December
Coffee/tea and some cookies will be provided
Please sign up for further event communications and calendar invites!
When: 9 December (12:30-4:00 PM) + 11 December (9-12 AM)
Where: University of Aruba, MC Chapel
Who: UA staff, students or anyone not from the University that would be interested to attend!
UARC event: Workshop on Supervision
Struggling with how you can be a good thesis supervisor? Sign up for the first workshop in 2026 on how to improve your supervision skills.
When: 15 January (1 - 2:30 PM)
Where: University of Aruba, MC Room 7
Other events/courses
The Digital Research Academy is organizing two free courses:
Sharing Computational Environments with Pixi (6-7 AM, 13 January)
Foundations of Research Data Management for GIS (11 AM -12:30 PM, 5 February - 5 March)
Research Highlight: Eric Mijts
Congratulations to Dr. Eric Mijts for leading the successful application of: ABC Natural History Collections (ABC-NHC)!
ABC-NHC will mobilize the knowledge hidden in natural history collections from Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao by digitizing them. In addition we will provide background information on the history of natural history collections originating from the ABC islands and provide a first analysis on what these collections tell us about present day biodiversity. All this information will be used to make a book ‘Biodiversity heritage of Aruba, Bonaire & Curaçao’, which will also be accessible online, giving the people of the ABC islands access to information on biodiversity found on their islands.
Research Highlight: Dr Franken
On 30 October 2025, Dr. Saskia Franken defended her dissertation: Understanding and Promoting Water Consumption Among Children in Aruba Using the Social Network Intervention Approach. This PhD was a collaboration between the University of Aruba and Erasmus University Rotterdam. Saskia’s main objective was to examine the effectiveness of an evidence-based, context-adapted social network intervention (Kies Awa / Choose Water), in which peer influencers promoted water consumption among their peers, while exploring the role of children’s social norms in Aruba. You can download a copy of the dissertation online, and stay tuned for a community event at the University of Aruba in 2026! Congratulations, Dr. Franken, on this huge accomplishment!
