Evens Journalism Prize for Geopolitics and Education 2020

The Evens Science Prize 2020 went to Professor Karin Roelofs of Radboud University (Behavioural Science Institute and Donders Institute for Brain Cognition and Behaviour).

The international expert jury of the Evens Science Prize 2020 decided unanimously to award the prize to Prof. Karin Roelofs for her research on acute stress responses, resilience in the face of traumatic events and the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms that shape how we react when confronted with these events.

Prof. Roelofs’ research has important implications for our understanding of how to design intervention programs aimed at training those imbued with societal responsibilities to exert effective control over their own behavioural responses when confronted with stress. The research aligns with the Evens Science Prize mission to further our understanding of human behaviour, with an emphasis on ethical aspects, cooperation and altruism.

The jury praised the work for its ambitious scope as well as for the richness of its measures and its careful design. Based on solid theoretical frameworks rooted in animal literature, such as freeze-fight-flight reactions, Prof. Roelofs’ research involved a longitudinal study comparing control participants and populations exposed to stress – in this case 340 Dutch police officers whose responses were studied over an extended period of time – and employed a wide variety of cognitive, physiological, hormonal and imaging measures. The results demonstrated not only that the frontal lobe of the brain exerts control over emotional fight-or-flight responses in stressful situations but, crucially, that the extent of this modulation is predictive of long-term resilience.

Evens Journalism Prize for Geopolitics and Education 2020

The Evens Journalism Prize aims to reward journalists whose work contributes highly to making Europe more comprehensive and accessible to a broad audience.

From 2019, the prize has been awarded in three different categories: Culture, Geopolitics and Education. With each prize, the Evens Foundation wishes to provide scope for independent and reliable journalism practiced by professionals with an established expertise on the subjects taken up by our organisation.

By means of these recognitions, we seek to support and honour journalists who have the potential to both challenge the current media landscape and to enrich its practice whilst positively contributing to the quality of the public debate. The ultimate goal would be to emphasise the importance of knowledge and ethical storytelling as a keystone for democracy.

For its 2020 edition, the Evens Journalism Prize focused on Geopolitics and Education.

For Geopolitics, it focused on contemporary dynamics in the European region, its power plays, geographical characteristics and recent history. The prize aimed at honouring journalists, reporters, and organisations that, through their work, favour the decipherment of Europe, offering their precise knowledge pertaining to European strategic internal and external relations, historical legacies, collective identity construction in an existing context of divisions, reunifications and discord. The main interest was on topics such as: European borders, political domestic