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The speech lab didn’t grow its services and facilities magically on its own. We have much to thank larger and smaller projects for.
The facilities mentioned on the home page of the speech lab don’t come out of nowhere. While some of them have been bought with the help of a Faculty guarantee (2017–2023), it is not a sustainable idea to rely on continual income, and indeed most facilities of the speech lab have been bought by larger projects.
All the EEG equipment was originally financed by externally funded large projects or other external grants. One set was provided by Paul Boersma’s NWO-Vici project in 2010, and the other set by an NWO Investering grant that the ACLC acquired in cooperation with Utrecht University (2012). These sets (BioSemi ActiveTwo) continue to work well, so they are still available in the lab in 2024. Electrodes, which do wear down, were of course originally supplied by the above projects, but renewals have been funded by (amongst others) Jasmin Pfeifer’s NWO PGw grant in 2017, Jakub Szymanik’s ERC Consolidator grant in 2017, and several times by the lab’s own limited fixed funding.
One eye-tracker was provided by Paul Boersma’s NWO-Vici project in 2009, and another in 2011 by the above-mentioned NWO Investering grant. Mobile eye-trackers (partly replacing the one from 2009) were acquired in 2017, partly financed by Natalia Rivera’s CONICYT grant and partly by a guarantee fron our Faculty. The wearable eye-tracker was acquired in 2023, mainly from Faculty money.
If you want to buy new equipment for your project, it is crucial to consult the technician (Dirk Vet) as well as the scientific director (Paul Boersma) before you draw up the budget of your grant proposal. This is because you may easily miss the true costs of the apparatus you want to acquire. For instance, there is a company that looks as though it offers an eye-tracker for only 6000 euros. That is too good to be a true. If you put only those 6000 euros on your budget, you are forgetting that making the device work will require a 1400-euro annual subscription, plus software that costs 10,000 euros. In total, the eye-tracker will cost 30,000 euros over the ten years in which you will want to use it, which is as much as the all-in-one eye-tracker that looked more expensive at first glance. Only the technician and lab director can help you figure out the true costs of the equipment, so you will want to contact both of them well before you decide how many months you will hire your post-docs for.
There are also other issues that you may not be aware of when writing a grant proposal. For instance, the subscription for the cheap-looking eye-tracker just mentioned would require you to send your uninterpretable EEG data to the company for conversion to something that you can actually use. This practice violates UvA regulations for data privacy and would therefore not pass the ethics review that is required for your research with human participants (the above-mentioned all-in-one eye-tracker turns out to work fully locally for as long as we have it). Again, the technician and scientific director can signal such problems in advance, and it is crucial to talk to them (both) as soon as you start conceptualizing your project, so that you won’t run into irreparable surprises later on.
The services mentioned on the home page of the speech lab are not free either.
Although the lab technician has a full job with the Faculty of Humanities, he is expected to earn part of his salary from project money. Large projects (NWO-Vidi/Vici, ERC, sometimes NWO Open Competition) can and should include technical support on their budget. Typically, the amount would be 0.1 FTE per researcher who needs to use the lab, for the duration of the project (i.e. 168 hours per researcher per year; this is a simple rule-of-thumb, as we don’t count the actual precise hours). For instance, the technician was paid for 1.0 FTE-years from Paul Boersma’s NWO-Vidi grant (2002–2007, two researchers), for 0.2 FTE-years from David Weenink’s NWO-Stevin grant (2006–2008), for 0.5 FTE-years from Bart de Boer’s NWO-Vidi grant (2008–2013, one PhD student), and for 1.5 FTE-years from Paul Boersma’s NWO-Vici grant (2009–2014, two PhD students and a post-doc). On top of that, money was transferred for Dirk’s contribution from Natalia Rivera’s CONICYT grant (2017–2020), Camilla Horslund’s grant from Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond (2018–2019), and Eva van Lier’s NWO-Vidi grant (2019–2024).
The lab managers are typically master students on temporary contracts. They can help you with running participants, annotating your recordings, analysing your data, and so on. The Faculty has provided a 0.3-FTE guarantee (2017–2023) for their employment, but in reality there have always been projects that have been able to pay for most of their salary. In fact, since the lab introduced the concept of “lab manager” in 2009, their salaries have been paid for over 90 percent from project money.
If you need support from the technician and/or lab managers for your project, it is crucial to consult the lab director (Paul Boersma) before you draw up the budget of your grant proposal.
And once your project is on its way, you never have to feel reluctant to ask them for their help, because you’re paying for it...
To sum up, if you are applying for a large grant (NWO-Vidi/Vici, ERC, sometimes NWO Open Competition), you definitely need to contact the speech lab’s scientific director well in advance of drawing up your budget, and you also need to contact both the technician and the scientific director about the facilities that you might need, again well in advance of drawing up your budget. Fortunately, they are very approachable and quick to respond, so don’t hesitate.
If you have no project money, or if you are on a smaller grant such as NWO-Veni, NWO-PGw, or a PhD grant from ACLC or FGw, or if you are a BA or MA student doing a thesis of tutorial or internship, then you will probably still be able to use the lab’s services and facilities for your research, but contacting at least the technician well before the project starts is still important, in order to check the availability of the lab, of its facilities, and of the required technical support (e.g. April through June are the busiest months, because of BA and MA theses).
For everybody, communicating early with the technician about your research is important, because they can advise you in designing your experiment and help you to set it up, to run it, and to analyse the resulting data.