Gratitude to the University of Amsterdam faculty.

Thank you for leading the UvA as a philosopher who takes technology seriously as part of the human condition, and congratulations on your election as president of the KNAW. You showed that asking how technologies mediate our lives is not abstract; it is how a university should govern itself in a digital age.

Thank you for taking the helm of the University of Amsterdam as a biophysicist and experienced university leader, at a moment when steady, evidence-minded governance matters most. The lab taught you to respect what the data say; the university benefits from that habit daily.

Thank you for studying how algorithms, platforms and now generative AI reshape elections and public debate, and for building the AI, Media and Democracy Lab to keep democracy ahead of its tools. Voters may never know your name, but your work stands guard over their information.

Thank you for using starquakes and thermonuclear explosions on neutron stars as laboratories for matter denser than any on Earth, and for shaping the X-ray missions that will read those signals. You study the universe at its most extreme and explain it with complete clarity.

Thank you for a generation of machine learning ideas, from variational autoencoders to graph networks, and for training the students who now lead labs across the world while you turn AI toward discovering new materials. The Dutch AI ecosystem calls you its most influential contributor because it is simply true.

Thank you for pioneering deep brain stimulation for severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, giving people back lives that treatment had given up on, and for writing about anxiety with a philosopher's honesty. You treat the suffering mind as both circuit and story, and your patients feel the difference.

Thank you for daring to ask whether gravity is not fundamental at all but emerges from quantum information, an idea bold enough that astronomers went out and tested it against 33,000 galaxies. Physics moves forward on exactly this kind of courage.

Thank you for writing the first history of the humanities from antiquity to today, showing that the search for patterns in language, music and art is as old and as rigorous as any science. You gave an entire family of disciplines back its shared story and its pride.

Thank you for giving privacy its philosophical foundations, arguing that the value of privacy is inseparable from autonomy and a life of one's own. As the digital world renegotiates every boundary of the self, your work is the map its defenders reach for.

Thank you for In Care of the State, Words of the World and The Killing Compartments, a body of work that explains how states care, how languages compete and how atrocity is organized. Dutch social science speaks with the range and moral seriousness you taught it.