Willem Vermeulen wins the Lanciersprijs award for his Bachelor thesis on Dutch migration patterns in the 19th century. For his work he collected millions of digitized individual municipal records from the Tilburg area and performed network analysis and statistical tests. Among the findings is a sudden and sustained increased migration flow around 1853 which is as of yet unexplained. Another finding is a ‘heritability’ of migration: a person is significantly more likely to marry in a different municipality if one of his/her parents did as well. Willem was supervised by Dr. Rick Quax in the Computational Science Lab.
The thesis titled ‘Domestic migration in the Tilburg region and Rotterdam between 1815 and 1900: a data driven analysis.‘ will soon be available online through UvA DARE or can be requested by contacting Rick. Willem is now a M.Sc. student in the Computational Science program.