Post docs

My name is Marieke Bos and I am a postdoc in the Brain and Development center of prof. Eveline Crone. I received my PhD in Clinical Psychology in 2014 from the University of Amsterdam. My research aim is to better understand the underlying mechanisms to explain the development and maintenance of psychopathology. After finishing my PhD that focused on the plasticity of emotional memory, I moved to Leiden to study the development of psychopathology in children and adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder in the Focus on Emotions lab. In March 2016, I joined the B and D center. My current work focuses on longitudinal analyses of brain structure and function in relation to psychopathology.

My name is Bianca van den Bulk and I am currently working as a project manager at the Leiden Consortium on Individual Development (L-CID). L-CID is part of the national Consortium on Individual Development (CID) and is referred to as the ‘Samen Uniek’ twin study to the participating families. Within this study, families with same-sex twins are followed over a six year period. During the annual assessments, data is collected on the development of social competence and behavioral control in the children. In addition, the parent-child relationship is investigated by using various observation tasks. Since January 2019, I have held the position of project manager at L-CID. I coordinate the overarching data collection and data processing and supervise non-scientific staff. In addition, I rganizes various scientific meetings and outreach activities. I maintains close contact with CID in Utrecht about human resources, project progress and finances. My passion is to properly streamline and facilitate large research projects with many parties involved, so that people can get the most out of the research project. If you will have any project related questions, please contact me.

My name is Lisa Bylinina. I am a linguist working at LUCL on a VENI project called ‘Number Words’. The goal of the project is to gain a deeper understanding of the relation between how we talk about numbers and how we think about them. More formally: the relation between how grammar of natural language treats numbers — and human number cognition. I approach this task from a cross-linguistic, morphosyntactic, semantic, philosophical and cognitive perspectives.

My name is Saskia Euser. My research focuses on environmental effects on children's social competence and behavioral control, with a specific focus on the role of children's daily life experiences, using ambulatory assessments. I am currently involved in a longitudinal intervention study with four different age cohorts, aimed at testing the differential susceptibility theory and studying (neurobiological) mechanisms of changes in development.

My name is Andreea Geambașu. I am currently working as the lab manager of the LUCL Experimental Linguistics Labs. In this function, I support ongoing research and researchers, and teach BA and MA courses on experimental methodology. My background is in linguistics (BA) and cognitive sciences (MSc). In 2018 I obtained my PhD from Leiden University in linguistics, specifically on the topic of language acquisition. My PhD research was part of an NWO-funded, interdisciplinary project studying the cognitive mechanisms underpinning the ability to form abstract rules from a given input. This ability is fundamental for the learning of grammar. Under the supervision of prof. dr. Claartje Levelt, I focused on whether infants are able to extract abstract rules from patterns in auditory and visual input, and how different aspects of the presentation and testing method may influence this ability. We used behavioral methods to study what domain-general (e.g., perception, memory) or domain-specific (e.g., phonological or visual similarity) constraints may help or hinder rule learning. My dissertation can be read in full here: https://www.lotpublications.nl/simple-rule-learning-is-not-simple-studies-on-infant-and-adult-pattern-perception-and-production.

My name is Pascal Haazebroek. I am involved in PACO-PLUS (www.paco-plus.org), a collaborative European project combining robotics, artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology.
My aim is to implement theories of attentional mechanisms in the human brain (perception and action planning, feature integration and learning) into models that are suitable to control cognitive humanoid robots.

My name is Esther Habers. I performed my PhD research at the Child Development and Exercise Center of the University Medical Center Utrecht. The studies presented in my PhD thesis were in the field of juvenile dermatomyositis, which is a rare systemic autoimmune disease affecting the microvasculature of the skeletal muscle and skin. The covered topics were immunology, muscle imaging techniques, exercise and training physiology, and (epi)genetics. Since December 2014, I am working as internal thesis supervisor at the Health, Medical and Neuropsychology Unit. In my research I am especially interested in the circadian rhythm and the interaction between the brain and the nervous system, immune system, and endocrine system in chronic inflammatory diseases.

My name is Anne Hafkemeijer. I joined the Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition in 2010. I obtained my research masters Cognitive Neuroscience and Medical Biology in Nijmegen. In 2016, I received my PhD at Leiden University on my thesis “Brain networks in aging and dementia” in the group of Prof. Serge Rombouts. My research interests are on functional and structural brain networks in healthy aging and diseases. Currently I work as MRI research coordinator and consultant in the LIBC support team to advise researchers on their MRI data analyses (questions can be directed to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ).

My name is Elseline Hoekzema. I am a senior postdoc in the Brain and Development lab. I joined the lab early 2015 with a Veni grant awarded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) to examine the effects of pregnancy hormones on the human brain. I first started working on this topic during her PhD, and in my postdoctoral work I have continued to examine the impact of endocrine factors on the brain. To study this, I use various neuroimaging approaches (sMRI, fMRI, ASL, DTI, MRS) combined with hormonal, behavioral and physiological measures. Before focusing on neuroendocrinological topics, in my main PhD projects I investigated treatment-induced neuroplasticity, brain morphology and activity in psychiatric disorders (primarily ADHD) as well as the effects of aging on different neurotransmitter systems in rats. In my current research, I examine how pregnancy alters the structure of the human brain

My name is Mike Keesman, and I am a postdoc and coordinator research on the BENEFIT project: Cardiologists, neurologists, general practitioners, academics, entrepreneurs, and patients have joined forces. Our mission is to make healthy living fun. Rather than telling people how to behave, we make healthy lifestyle choices appealing: the carrot is mightier than the stick. We envisage a national ecosystem that combines evidence-based lifestyle interventions focused on the individual, with an innovative environmental system that incorporates rewarding everyday lifestyle and adherence behaviors. The ecosystem integrates care and non-care settings, connects public and private lifestyle partners, is financially sustainable, and is fueled by continuous scientific evaluation. We all BENEFIT!

My name is Eduard Klapwijk. I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Brain and Development Research Center, studying predictors and effects of alcohol use on the adolescent brain.

My name is Daniël Kleinloog. I have done my PhD at the Centre for Human Drug Research (CHDR) in Leiden. For my PhD, I further developed pharmacological challenges as model for psychosis. We performed studies with THC and ketamine to induce psychomimetic symptoms in healthy volunteers. For the THC model, we were able to reduce these symptoms with the antipsychotic olanzapine. In my thesis, I also analyse different outcome measures that can be used to quantify the effects of the pharmacological challenges, including RS-fMRI.

My name is Ahmed Mahfouz. I am currently a postdoctoral researcher working on a joint project between the Delft Bioinformatics Lab (TU Delft, Delft) and the Department of Radiology at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC, Leiden). My research project is about Brain Imaging Genetics, a field focused on linking imaging phenotypes to genetic causes. I am mainly working on linking spatially-mapped genetic data from the Allen Institute for Brain Sciences to mouse and human brain MRI scans, for better understanding of neurological diseases (e.g. Autism and Migraine).

My name is Verónica Expósito de Mäki-Marttunen. I am a biologist and experimental neuroscientist. I am interested in unveiling the brain mechanisms underlying consciousness and cognition. My current research is on the role of neuromodulatory systems on behavior and brain activity and connectivity. This is challenging in humans, and therefore I am employing a variety of methods, including pharmacology, MRI and neurophysiological measures such as pupillometry, EEG and fMRI.

My name is Floor van Meer and I work as a postdoc at the department of Social, Economic and Organisational Psychology. I received my PhD in 2017 from the UMC Utrecht on the neural processing of healthy foods in normal-weight and overweight children and adults. My research interests are decision-making, reward processing and food choice. In my current project I am examining the neural mechanisms of hedonic compensation to see if working memory load interferes with reward processing during consumption.

My name is Chloé Najac completed my PhD in 2014 under the supervision of Drs. Julien Valette and Vincent Lebon at the Molecular Imaging Research Centre in Paris. During my PhD, I developed novel MR tools to assess brain tissue microstructure using diffusion-weighted MR spectroscopy and cellular metabolism using direct MR detection of 17O metabolism, the only MR-visible oxygen nuclei. After graduating, I joined as a post-doctoral fellow the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at the University of California in San Francisco, where I studied brain tumor metabolism using hyperpolarized 13C MR spectroscopy in the group of Pr. Sabrina Ronen. Mid-august 2018, I joined the C.J. Gorter Center for high field MRI as a post-doctoral fellow. Under the guidance of Drs. Hermien Kan and Itamar Ronen, I continued my work on developing MR spectroscopy based methods to study the brain. My main focus is to investigate brain microstructure, function and biochemistry in healthy and pathological conditions.

My name is Marieke Niesters. I work as a Post Doc researcher at the department of anesthesiology in the LUMC and cooperate with the LIBC on projects addressing the effect of pharmaca and anesthesia procedures on resting-state fMRI.

My name is Sandy Overgaauw and I received my PhD in 2015 at Leiden University. The aim of my PhD-project was to understand developmental changes and individual differences in empathic concern and the relation with social reorientation from a brain and behavioral perspective. Currently I work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Clinical Psychology department at Leiden University. My research interests are focused on the cognitive and neural mechanisms of social performance monitoring and learning in social anxiety and psychopathy.

My name is Leticia Pablos. My research interest is in the interdisciplinary fields of psycho and neurolinguistics. I am interested in the subconscious mechanisms present in the comprehension of phenomena on the syntax-semantics interface such as negative polarity items and in the formation of long-distance dependencies of different kinds such as wh-dependencies, topic-clitic dependencies and pronoun-antecedent dependencies. To study these phenomena I use both behavioral techniques and electrophysiology.

My name is Kaya Peerdeman. I’m a post doc and lecturer at the Health, Medical and Neuropsychology unit of Leiden University. My research focuses on placebo and nocebo effects, particularly those on pain, itch, and fatigue. In my work I aim to study the psychoneurobiological mechanisms of placebo and nocebo effects and ways of harnessing these effects in clinical practice.

My name is Sabine Peters. I received my Master's degree in Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 2010 from the University of Amsterdam. During my two internships I investigated the neural basis of insomnia (Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience) and hippocampal volume in depression (King's College London). I also worked as an MRI-assistant in the UvA Cognitive Neuroscience group. In my PhD project, supervised by Eveline Crone and Cédric Koolschijn, I investigated cognitive, affective and neural development in children and adolescents. My post-doc project focuses on development of self concept and prosocial behavior in adolescence.

My name is Teresa Pronto. I am a postdoctoral researcher in the project Knowledge and Culture, subproject Text setting. The expression ‘text setting’ denotes the process of aligning textual units to musical units in creating and/or performing vocal music. What is interesting about text setting is that native speakers (who are active participants in their singing traditions) have clear intuitions as to how to map a text onto a tune, despite the lack of explicit training and the difficulty implied by the coordination of the various abilities involved. How do people do this? My contribution to answering this question consists of an empirical study of individual singing idioms and natural languages.

My name is Sanneke van Rooden and I am a post-doc researcher at the department of Radiology at the Leiden University Medical Center and Faculty of Social Sciences in Leiden. I have completed my Ph.D. in 2015 on Alzheimer’s disease imaging using ultra-high field MRI (7 Tesla) at the department of Radiology at the LUMC. I have studied Psychology at the University of Utrecht and specialized in Clinical Neuropsychology. I am interested in exploring which MRI techniques and cognitive tests are able to detect the earliest signs of Alzheimer’s disease and sporadic cerebral amyloid angiopathy (both diseases caused by deposition of amyloid-beta in the brain). In my current project I investigate patients with subjective cognitive impairment and mild cognitive impairment (potentially early stages of Alzheimer’s disease) using functional MRI.

My name is Mischa de Rover. Currently, I am working on functional imaging of small brain nuclei, like the dopaminergic ventral tegmental area and substantia nigra, at high field strength (7 Tesla).
In addition, I am appointed by the LIBC to advise researchers on implementing their study at the research dedicated MR facility, as well as on MRI data analysis. Together with Wouter Teeuwisse, he is responsible for general support related to the MRI scanner and training researchers to safely work in the MR environment. All scanner-related questions can be directed to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

My name is Julie Rutten.

My name is Sophie Schmid and I am a post-doc researcher in the department Radiology, working in the C.J. Gorter Center for High Field MRI in the LUMC. My main research interest is to develop MR-biomarkers to measure the hemodynamic properties of the microvasculature in the brain. I focus on the technical development and optimization of spatially non-selective arterial spin labeling (ASL) techniques, such as velocity and acceleration selective ASL, to measure the tissue perfusion without using contrast agents.

My name is Anna van ’t Veer. During my doctoral years I studied moral psychology, with a special interest in cognitive and affective processes underlying deception and deception detection. I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Child and Family Studies at Leiden University, where I focus on the evolutionary, biological (hormonal) and neural correlates of fatherhood.

My name is Monique van Velzen. I work as a postdoctoral researcher at the department of Anesthesiology in the LUMC and I cooperate with the LIBC on projects addressing pain perception, and the effect of analgesics and anesthesic compounds on the brain.

My name is Steven van der Werff, post-doctoral researcher at the department of Psychiatry of the LUMC. I received my MSc. Degree in Clinical Psychology in Leiden. My Phd project focused on neurobiological mechanisms of resilience to stress. Techniques I use consist mainly of neuro-imaging techniques MRI / fMRI.

My name is Lara Wierenga. My post doctoral research focuses on modeling brain development with longitudinal study designs in order to get a better understanding of genetic and environmental effects on brain development. Both structural MRI and DWI data are analysed to investigate brain changes in children and adolescents using mixed model regression analysis, machine learning and complex network analysis. Of particular interest are the influence of puberty related factors on brain development and how these may differently interact with growth in males and females.

My name is Jurriaan Witteman. I am a post-doctoral researcher interested in how the human brain decodes (emotional) speech. Recently, I have also developed an interest in neuropsychopharmacology and addiction. I study these topics using neuroimaging methods.

Post docs

Share us