The first AMS grants were awarded for 2026, supporting researchers within the AMS programs. These grants aim to stimulate collaboration, strengthen the program, and provide opportunities for researchers to further develop and share their work.

Sports - Talent Grant

Pim van Klij has been awarded the Sports grant of €20,000 for his project ‘Building a National Clinical and Research Consortium for Female Athlete Health: Uniting All Dutch Women’s Premier League Football Clubs'.

Pim shares; "As a sports medicine physician and post-doc researcher, I am confronted at a daily basis that female athletes are structurally underrepresented in sports medicine research, resulting in major gaps in research and their clinical healthcare."

With this grant he aims to establish a national clinical and research consortium for female athlete health in elite football, as a foundation for future large-scale research initiative and longitudinal cohort.

Tissue Function & Regeneration - Talent Grant

Ivo Lutke Schipholt has been awarded the Sports grant of €20,000 for his project ‘BRAIN-RA Pilot: Imaging Neuroinflammation to Understand Persistent Pain in Rheumatoid Arthritis.'.

Ivo shares; "This talent grant allows me to apply and extend these methods (neuroinflammation imaging using TSPO-PET/CT in pain conditions) to RA, a major rheumatic disease, where neuroinflammation mechanisms in persistent pain remain unexplored in vivo."

With this grant that will be carried out in collaboration with professor dr. Conny van der Laken, he aims to preform a pilot study to collect feasibility and preliminary data to inform the design of and power calculations for a future full-scale grant application (NWO Veni and FOREUM). 

Tissue Function & Regeneration - Talent Grant

Jari Dahmen has been awarded the Tissue Function & Regeneration grant of €30,000 for his project ‘Molecular Phenotyping of Subchondral Bone Cysts in Ankle:  A Precision Medicine Approach to Predicting Success (or not!) '.

Jari shares; "As a clinician at heart, I am driven by the questions patients raise daily in the clinic. This grant will provide a timely opportunity to formalize and accelerate this instinct: to translate unresolved clinical questions into rigorous research, and to bring the resulting insights back to the bedside in a practical, meaningful way."

With this grant he aims  to use molecular profiles to individualize patient outcomes aligns with the program's broader goal of connecting fundamental musculoskeletal science to clinical practice — moving from biological insight to patient-specific, stage-specific treatment strategies. 

Aging & Vitality - Biological aging Grant

Herbert van Essen has been awarded the Aging & Vitality grant of €29.900 for his project 'Targeting biological age acceleration through a hospital-based lifestyle front office: a secondary analysis of the LOFIT study'.

With this grant he aims to: (1) quantify the extent of accelerated biological ageing across diagnostic groups; (2) identify lifestyle-, behavioural- and psychosocial factors associated with age acceleration at baseline; (3) examine whether age acceleration changes over 12 months and how these changes relate to changes lifestyle-, behavioural- an psychosocial factors; and (4) compare change in age acceleration between intervention and control following guidance from the lifestyle front office.

Aging & Vitality - Biological aging Grant

Dax Houtkamp has been awarded the Aging & Vitality grant of €18.500 for his project 'Are metabolic signatures of physical inactivity signs of accelerated aging? '.

With this grant he aims to determine whether metabolomic changes induced by prolonged physical inactivity track concurrent declines in physiological function, and to evaluate whether the Personal-MetaboHealth Score provides a sensitive marker of this functional deterioration and accelerated aging phenotype.

A full overview of all the awarded 2026 grants and recipients so far can be found here.