I did my fellowship at IAS from February to July 2025. The IAS is a great place for getting new research inspiration after a busy teaching period. The fellow room with comfy chairs and a beautiful view on the city was ideal for reading, and the lunches or other encounters with researchers at IAS resulted in inspiring conversations.

One of the things I appreciated a lot is how IAS stimulates drawing connections outside of your research field. People who come to IAS for their research are genuinely interested in hearing what you work on also when your research topics might seem unrelated. The recipe of bringing people together from different fields and search for connections, really works.

The kick-off lecture was a great way to take steps in my thinking and discuss these ideas with people I did not know yet. I was recommended by a former fellow to send the invitation for my kick-off lecture to a list of people I was hoping to talk with and this indeed resulted in several fun coffee appointments.

I attended multiple interesting workshops and events. One that I remember as particularly interesting was a workshop on ‘Pattern as a Figure of Knowledge’ in which we explored the notion of patterns and the role it plays in different disciplines. In my own field (psychology), patterns often function as targets for explanation. For example, a pattern across many datasets is that depression is more frequently diagnosed in females than males and so we can try to find explanations for this pattern. But patterns fascinate researchers for other reasons as well, such as their beauty. Two other very interesting events were the workshop ‘Resilience in Complex Systems: Insights Across Disciplines’ and the brainstorm event ‘Is the central role of the DSM in the organisation of Dutch mental health care still tenable?’, which combined insights from psychiatry, psychotherapy and philosophy. All these events brought together people from different fields, which in each case resulted in very interesting conversations.

My own research centers around questions about measurement in psychology, which fits nicely in the Measurement research theme of the IAS. Together with Jolien Francken (former fellow of the IAS), we were asked to write a chapter on measurement for the IAS book that is being launched to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the IAS. This opportunity made us reflect on measurement related events that we have organized at IAS before, of which we are still profiting. For example, this August we organized a symposium at the conference of the European Philosophy of Science Association (EPSA) together with several people we got to know through a workshop on Measurement across the sciences Jolien and I organized at IAS. Working on the book chapter also made us think of possible future events on this topic. As such I look forward to attending as well as organizing events at IAS in the future, but for now I want to thank the whole IAS team for the wonderful and inspiring time I had, and also for the nice chats in the common room. I highly recommend doing a fellowship at IAS!