ABOUT ME

I am an assistant professor of developmental psychopathology at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. In my research, I focus on the effects of the early child family environment on child brain development and behavior, but am also interested in the neurobiology of parenting. Because children are highly resilient, I believe consequences of stressful early environments are often adaptations instead of damage. This view gives children agency, and enables child care professionals to work with these consequences of adversity instead of against them. In addition to family processes, I am interested in child and adolescent externalizing behaviors such as aggression, deception, and substance use.  

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I obtained my PhD at the Erasmus University in 2015 on a study on the neurobiological correlates of externalizing and prosocial behaviors in school-age children. During my PhD studies, I obtained an Erasmus University Trustfund scholarship in order to spend three months at the lab of prof. dr. Kent Kiehl at the University of New Mexico (Albuquerque, NM, USA), to study brain activation patterns in incarcerated youth.

After defending my PhD, I worked as a postdoc on a ERC advanced grant on the neurobiology of fatherhood awarded to prof. dr. Marianne Bakermans-Kranenburg at Leiden University (Leiden, the Netherlands). 

In 2017, I was awarded an NWO Rubicon grant to spend 18 months at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA in order to study the association between a child's family environment and accelerated pubertal and neural development. In 2019, I returned to the Netherlands and was appointed as assistant professor at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam.

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In my free time, I enjoy exploring the world with my two children, Lucas (5 y.o.) and Oscar (2 y.o.), reading, baking, and exercising.