Original research & dissemination
Conduct original, interdisciplinary research and share it openly with scholarly and public audiences.
About the Institute
Residua Research Institute is a not-for-profit foundation that studies the traces human life leaves behind, in data, in testimony, and in the material record. We exist to produce independent research of lasting public value and to build an enduring home for interdisciplinary science in Europe.
Who we are
Residua was founded on a simple conviction: the questions that matter most about social life rarely respect the boundaries between disciplines. Understanding how communities form, how knowledge is made, and how the past shapes the present requires social theory, computational power, and laboratory rigour working together.
The Institute is established as a stichting, a Dutch not-for-profit foundation, and operates across the Netherlands, the European Union, and internationally. Its three founding directors hold their fields as equal partners, and the Institute is structured so that no single discipline subordinates the others.
We are deliberately small, method-led, and ambitious. Our aim is to compete at the highest level for European research funding while remaining a genuinely collaborative place to work.
At a glance
Legal form: Stichting (Netherlands not-for-profit foundation)
Operating name: Residua Research Institute
Reach: Netherlands, European Union, international
Focus: Sociology, computational social science, AI, ethnography, biomolecular archaeology
Our mission
The Institute pursues a set of clear, mutually reinforcing objectives. Together they describe what Residua is for.
Conduct original, interdisciplinary research and share it openly with scholarly and public audiences.
Apply for and host major competitive research funding, including from the European Research Council and Horizon Europe.
Provide an institutional home for the Principal Investigator and research team, with the independence that serious science requires.
Train and mentor early-career researchers, building lasting capacity across the Institute's disciplines.
Communicate research responsibly and engage the public in the questions and findings that affect them.
Develop research tools and artificial intelligence transparently, ethically, and in the service of sound inquiry.
Our name
A residuum is what remains after a process is complete: the residue, the trace, the deposit that carries the signature of what came before. Across our disciplines, the residue is where the evidence lives. It is the molecular trace in a sample, the data exhaust of social life, the testimony recorded in the field, the deposit left in the ground.
Residua takes these remains seriously as evidence, and treats the work of reading them, carefully and responsibly, as the heart of the Institute.
Our values