Prior to starting a PhD in Biological Psychology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Melisa graduated with a Psychology Bachelor’s from University of California, Berkeley, and a Clinical Psychology Master’s from Leiden University. She was a research assistant at the psychiatry department of University of California, San Francisco, psychology department of Erasmus University Rotterdam, and was a lecturer at Leiden University. She has been actively involved in psychophysiological studies in relation to anxiety, borderline, schizophrenia, dissociation, and misophonia. Her research interests include the physiological pathways through which allostatic load gets generated, and the precise ambulatory measurement of the physiological stress response.

“How can we accurately measure physiological stress responses and more carefully assess cardiac vagal control in daily life research using wearable monitors?”

Among the autonomic parameters strongly linked with the stress response, as well as psychological and cardiometabolic conditions, comes heart rate variability (HRV). It is delved deeper into controlling for the effects of respiratory behaviour (e.g., breathing period, tidal volume, IE-ratio) on HRV, so that more reliable daily life assessment of cardiac parasympathetic control can be achieved. In identifying the optimal methodologies to quantify cardiac parasympathetic control in ecological settings, she makes use of multilevel modelling, machine learning techniques and ecological momentary assessment. Her project also involves the selection of wearables that can validly capture physiological responses in response to psychosocial stressors, including those personally significant, in both laboratory and daily life settings.

PhD student,
VU Amsterdam

Melisa is member of the
Junior Think Tank