Researchers
Our Stress in Action consortium consists of 50+ scientists with multidisciplinary backgrounds. The consortium is affiliated with five universities (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Utrecht University, Erasmus University Rotterdam, University of Groningen and University of Twente) and their University Medical Centers (Amsterdam UMC (location VUmc), UMCG and Erasmus MC). Consortium members are listed below alphabetically.
Members
George Aalbers
Amsterdam UMC
Postdoc
George Aalbers is a postdoctoral researcher at the Psychiatry department of the Amsterdam UMC, location VUmc. His current research focuses on recognising and forecasting depression with smartphone- and wearable-based data and machine learning. Previously, George applied cross-sectional and time-series network analysis to study psychopathology and its relation to social media use. Most recently, his PhD research combined methodological and conceptual insights from psychology, computational, and communication science to predict momentary well-being from passively logged smartphone app use. George is trained in Communication Science (BSc) and Clinical Psychology (BSc; rMSc) at the University of Amsterdam.
Iris Arends
UMCG
Postdoc
Iris Arends is a senior researcher at the Department of Health Sciences, Community and Occupational Medicine, of the University Medical Center Groningen. Her research focuses on the relationship between mental health and work including topics such as how early life mental health affects working life, how work can foster mental health and how the work participation of people with mental health problems can be supported. Iris strongly collaborates with practice through her part-time position at Arbo Unie, a large occupational health service, where she manages the research that is undertaken together with various universities and other research institutes.
Meike Bartels
VU
Professor in Genetics and Wellbeing
Meike Bartels is University Research Chair Professor in Genetics and Wellbeing at the department of Biological Psychology at the Vrije Universiteit. She is a renowned international expert in the field of Wellbeing, where she combines multi-omics techniques to get a better hold on the causes of individual differences. She is prinicipal investigator of several large interdisciplinairy project (ERC-Consolidator grant, NWO VICI grant). She published over 250 papers in peer-reviewed journal including the first molecular genetic evidence for wellbeing in PNAS and the first genomic variant for wellbeing in Nature Genetics. She is the president of the International Positive Psychology Association and one of the past presidents of the Behavior Genetics Association. She combines research with teaching and is the Director of the Research Master Genes in Behaviour and Health, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.
Eric Boersma
Erasmus MC
Professor of Clinical Epidemiology of Cardiovascular Diseases
Eric Boersma studied Mathematics and Epidemiology. He is full professor of Clinical Epidemiology of Cardiovascular Diseases at Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, where he leads the Clinical Epidemiology and Innovation Unit of the department of Cardiology. He has over 30 years experience in the fields of cardiovascular diseases and biostatistics. His teaching and research interests focus on statistical and epidemiological methods for clinical data analysis, risk modelling in cardiovascular diseases, with emphasis on the role of imaging and blood biomarkers, and sex differences in medicine. He supervised over 30 PhD students and published over 700 journal articles in these areas (https://pure.eur.nl/en/persons/eric-boersma). Eric is chair of the Erasmus MC Cardiovascular Institute, member of the Dutch Medicines Evaluation Board, and member of the Health Council of the Netherlands.
Laura Bringmann
RUG
Associate Professor
Laura Bringmann is an associate professor at the department of psychometrics and statistics at the University of Groningen, and heads the LaBlab (Laura Bringmann’s intensive longitudinal data lab; https://www.laurabringmannlab.com/). She has published widely in flagship psychology journals, including Psychological Review, World Psychiatry, Psychological Methods, and Current Directions in Psychological Science. Her research focuses on bridging the gap between different fields such as statistics, philosophy, methodology, and clinical psychology. She received a NWO VENI grant in 2019, and initiated and organizes the biannual Dutch-Belgian meeting, “DynaNeT,” which brings together researchers from statistical and clinical fields.
Caroline Broeder
Amsterdam UMC
PhD student
Caroline Broeder is a PhD candidate at the department of Psychiatry and the department of Anatomy and Neurosciences of Amsterdam UMC, location VUmc. She has a background in cognitive neuroscience. Caroline is currently working on the RESET-medication study (www.jeugdtrauma-depressie.nl), a randomized controlled trial investigating the efficacy of pharmacological treatment for alleviating depressive symptoms in adults with major depressive disorder and childhood trauma. Within the RESET-study, she is working on an MRI sub-study on stress system dynamics. She has a broad interest in stress system dynamics across psychiatric disorders.
Ute Bültmann
UMCG
Professor of Work and Health
Ute Bültmann (PhD) is an internationally recognized researcher in the field of Work and Health. She is a health scientist, epidemiologist, and full professor of work and health from a life course perspective at the Department of Health Sciences, Community and Occupational Medicine, at the University Medical Center Groningen. Her research focuses on the (psychosocial) epidemiology of work and health, in particular mental health problems, the prevention of work-related illness, sickness absence, and work disability, the identification of labour market trajectories, the measurement of psychosocial factors at work and innovative health-related work outcomes.
Eco de Geus
VU
Professor of Biological Psychology
Martin Gevonden
VU
Assistant Professor
Martin Gevonden is assistant professor at the department of Biological Psychology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research interests include trauma, inequality and mental health, and how emerging (wearable) technology can be used to monitor the critical physiological and contextual parameters of the underlying disease process. He has first-authored publications in high-impact journals such as World Psychiatry and JAMA Psychiatry, and leads the VU-AMS development team, an ambulatory monitoring system for the measurement of stress in daily-life (www.vu-ams.nl).
Ellen Hamaker
UU
Professor of Longitudinal Data Analysis
Ellen Hamaker is professor at Utrecht University, where she is head of the Dynamic Modeling Lab (https://dml.sites.uu.nl/). Her work focuses on the development and evaluation of longitudinal analysis techniques for panel data (consisting of a small number of repeated measures), and intensive longitudinal data (consisting of a large number of repeated measures, typically spaced densely in time). Ellen’s work has had considerable impact on the research practices in psychology and related fields, as shown by the fact that she is a Highly Cited Researcher (based on Web of Science citations). Her work is currently supported by an ERC consolidator grant.
Manon Hillegers
Erasmus MC
Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Prof. Manon Hillegers is a (child) psychiatrist and head of the department of child and adolescent psychiatry/psychology at the Erasmus Medical Center-Sophia children’s hospital. Hillegers has experience in early-life risk factors and in depth intergenerational (stress) measurements in relationship to mental health trajectories. She brings in expertise with several longitudinal cohort studies with deep phenotyping including EMA. In addition, expertise from several serious gaming studies, in which she examines or modulates mood and behaviour in ambulatory daily-life setting (e.g. with the Grow It! app, www.growitapp.nl, or within the eHealth Junior consortium).
Mark Hoogendoorn
VU
Professor in Artificial Intelligence
Mark Hoogendoorn is a full professor in Artificial Intelligence at the Department of Computer Science of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and chairs the Quantitative Data Analytics group. His research focuses on machine learning and its application in the domain of health and wellbeing. He has led and been involved in a variety of projects AI and Health projects including the EU projects ICT4Depression, E-COMPARED, and ICARE4OLD. He is board member of the VU Campus Center for AI and Health and Amsterdam Medical Data Science, and was a board member of the International Society for Research on Internet Interventions.
Peter de Jonge
RUG
Professor of Developmental Psychology
Peter de Jonge (PhD) is one of the top researchers in the Netherlands on the interface between psychology and psychiatry. He is programme leader of the research programme Interdisciplinary Centre Psychopathology and Emotion Regulation (ICPE, www.icpe.nl) (UMCG and RuG) and vice-dean of research of the Faculty Behavioral and Social Sciences (RuG).
Armağan Karahanoğlu
UT
Assistant professor
Armağan Karahanoğlu is assistant professor in Interaction Design, and DesignLab research fellow, at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Her core expertise lays at the intersection of psychology and interaction design, which she combines to better understand how to create meaningful and engaging human-technology interactions. Being a human-centred designer and design researcher, she studies the effects of lifestyle tracking technologies (e.g. personal informatics, wearables and self-tracking tools) on people’s health and wellbeing. She also explores how interaction design practices can change or regulate health behaviour in a socially acceptable manner.
Willeke Kitselaar
VU
Postdoc
Willeke Kitselaar is a postdoctoral researcher part of the Data Infrastructure Support Core (DISC) and works at the department of Biological Psychology at the VU Amsterdam. She gained experience with ambulatory data during and after her MSc. medical psychology at Tilburg University. For her PhD at Leiden University, she worked intensively with big data investigating data-driven approaches for early identification of persistent somatic symptoms (PSS). During her PhD she co-founded the European PSS early career researchers network, promoting interdisciplinary collaboration. Her main research interests involve big data solutions and (physiological) processes involved in the effects of stress on health.
Jan-Willem van ‘t Klooster
UT
Associate Professor
As head of department of the BMS faculty innovation lab, Jan-Willem is responsible for the strategy, technical management, research, operations, finances and team of 15FTE at BMS LAB which runs about 250 research projects each year. The lab consists of about 20 state of the art lab spaces; a world class mobile lab; research software, data science, VR and web development capacity; 1600 lendables; advanced VR, neuroscience and physiological measurement capacities; and a portfolio of advanced software instruments for teaching and research. As associate professor, Jan-Willems research line strongly makes use of this platform, and focuses on monitoring and coaching technologies.
Susanne Kuckuck
Erasmus MC
PhD Student
After finishing her master’s degree in neuroscience (cum laude), Susanne Kuckuck is currently working as a PhD candidate in the group of Prof. Liesbeth van Rossum at the Department of Internal Medicine at the Obesity Center CGG, Erasmus MC, Rotterdam. There, she is greatly enjoying studying the effects of glucocorticoid excess on cardiometabolic health. Her special interest lies in investigating hormonal correlates of appetite and metabolism and their role in the development of obesity under conditions of stress.
Femke Lamers
Amsterdam UMC
Associate Professor
Femke Lamers (PhD) is associate professor and principle investigator at the Psychiatry department of Amsterdam UMC. She is a psychiatric epidemiologist and program leader of the Mental health program of the Amsterdam Public Health research institute.
Robin Lengton
Erasmus MC
PhD Student
Robin Lengton is a first-year PhD student at the Erasmus MC, Rotterdam. Her research focuses on analyzing measures of daily-life stress response in relation to cardiometabolic health status. In addition, she will assist in validating novel biological stress measures. Prior to arriving at SiA, Robin completed a Master’s degree in Biomedical Sciences, where her thesis focused on the associations between long-term glucocorticoid levels, sensitivity of glucocorticoid receptor to glucocorticoids and (psychological) stress in patients with obesity. In the last two years she has continued her work in this field within the working group of Prof. Dr. E.F.C. van Rossum.
Geke Ludden
UT
Professor in Interaction Design
Geke is professor and head of the Interaction Design group at the University of Twente. She is fellow of the UT DesignLab and connected to the TechMed Centre. Geke is a design researcher and expert on design for behaviour change and engagement. Central to her work is the question how (interaction) design influences human-technology relations and behaviour. She studies this question in the increasingly important context of following technology supported therapy at home and using technology to self-manage health and disease (see https://www.utwente.nl/en/et/dpm/id/). She has contributed to over 100 peer-reviewed publications in the design and human computer interaction domain as well as in the health domain.
Solomiia Myroniuk
RUG
PhD Student
Solomiia Myroniuk is a PhD student in the Department of Developmental Psychology at the University of Groningen. She completed a Research Master’s in Behavioral and Social Sciences with a specialization in lifespan development and socialization. During her studies, she gathered experience in collaborative research by being part of the multinational PsyCorona project. Currently, she is interested in the influence of early interpersonal stressful environments in shaping resilient and vulnerable developmental trajectories and later stress reactions. As part of the Stress in Action project, she focuses on integrating and summarizing scholarly knowledge on stress, as based on more than 50 years of theoretical developments and empirical evidence.
Matthijs Noordzij
UT
Professor in Health Psychology and Technology
Matthijs Noordzij is a health psychology and technology professor at the University of Twente, Netherlands. His research focuses on how technology can support and change (mental) healthcare and self-management. He works to establish scientific standards for validating new wearable technologies that measure important aspects of human physiology for use in healthcare and research. Noordzij has conducted innovative field studies to track people with stress, aggression, or addiction problems over long periods of time to establish links between their bodies, thoughts, behavior, and environments. He has also collaborated with stakeholders to co-design ambulatory biofeedback and novel bio cueing systems (https://senseitapp.nl/) for self-regulation.
Jasmin Pasteuning
Amsterdam UMC
PhD Student
Jasmin Pasteuning is a PhD-candidate at the department of Psychiatry at Amsterdam UMC, location VUmc. She has a background in Neurosciences and Philosophy of Neurosciences. Currently, she is working on research that focuses on the multilevel dynamics of the stress system in people with depression and childhood trauma. In her research, she uses several different tools, including fMRI and experience sampling methods
Brenda Penninx
Amsterdam UMC
Professor of Psychiatry and Epidemiology
Brenda Penninx is professor and vice-chair at the psychiatry department of Amsterdam UMC, location VUmc. She is an international expert in cross-disciplinary mental health research integrating psychiatry, psychology, neuroimaging, genomics, psychoneuroendocrinology, sociology and behavioural medicine. Penninx is principal investigator of the multi-site, longitudinal Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety (nesda.nl), and co-initiated the MARIO study that follows high-risk children and young adults in their stress and psychopathology patterns during life (mario-project.nl). Penninx has supervised over 50 PhD-students, published over 800 scientific papers, is member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), of which she currently serves as vice-President.
Wouter Peyrot
Amsterdam UMC
Assistant professor
Wouter Peyrot is psychiatrist and statistical genetics researcher at the Department of Psychiatry of Amsterdam UMC, and the Department of Complex Trait Genetics at VU University. He has a background in medicine and mathematics, and led various international projects to study the interplay between genetic effects and stress in depression. Following his PhD (cum laude) in 2017, he was awarded with a Rubicon and Veni grant, and worked as postdoc in statistical genetics at Harvard University in America. He recently founded Genetic Network Amsterdam (geneticsnetworkamsterdam.org), and works two days a week as psychiatrist at the acute mental health care services (‘crisisdienst’).
Birna van Riemsdijk
UT
Associate professor
Dr. M. Birna van Riemsdijk is associate professor Intimate Computing (https://intimate-computing.net/) at University of Twente. Her research mission is to develop design methods and computational representation and reasoning techniques for creating intimate technologies that take into account our human vulnerability in supporting us in our daily lives: intimate computing is computing with vulnerability. For her research on software that takes into account personal norms and values she was awarded a Vidi personal grant and the Dutch Prize for Research in ICT 2014. She was elected member (2012-2018) of the board of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems and she coordinates the Special Interest Group on Ethics in the Hybrid Intelligence NWO gravitation programme.
Dimitris Rizopoulos
Erasmus MC
Professor in Biostatistics
Dimitris Rizopoulos is a Professor in Biostatistics at the Erasmus University Medical Center. He received an M.Sc. in statistics (2003) from the Athens University of Economics and Business and a Ph.D. in Biostatistics (2008) from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Dr. Rizopoulos wrote his dissertation and several methodological and applied articles on various aspects of models for survival and longitudinal data analysis. He is the author of a book on joint models for longitudinal and time-to-event data. He has also written three freely available packages to fit such models in R under maximum likelihood (i.e., package JM) and the Bayesian approach (i.e., packages JMbayes2 and JMbayes). He currently serves as co-Editor for Biostatistics (https://academic.oup.com/biostatistics).
Annelieke Roest
RUG
Assistant Professor
Annelieke M. Roest is an assistant professor at the department of Developmental Psychology at the University of Groningen. In her research, she takes a lifespan approach to anxiety and depression. Topics that she studies include, among others, the epidemiology of anxiety and depression in general population studies, treatment of anxiety and depression in childhood and adolescence, and anxiety and depressive symptomatology in persons with somatic diseases. Her methodological expertise lies in systematic review and meta-analysis, with a specific focus on publication and reporting biases.
Marcos Ross
Amsterdam UMC
PhD Student
Marcos Ross is a PhD candidate working at the psychiatry department of the Amsterdam UMC (location VUmc). With a background in biochemistry, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind, he has a multidisciplinary mindset and a profound interest for the human experience. He is especially passionate about bringing an integrated view of mind, body, and world closer to scientific discourse and healthcare. His past research has focused on well-being from a network science perspective and has seen that personalized network models that include both symptoms and well-being traits (e.g., satisfaction, optimism) can be a powerful tool to increase self-understanding. He is also a musician (Marcos Ross Music). Overall, he is a driven and creative person, always open to learn.
Liesbeth van Rossum
Erasmus MC
Professor of Medicine
Elisabeth van Rossum (MD, PhD) is internist-endocrinologist, and full professor in the field of obesity and biological stress. She obtained her MD in 2000 (cum laude) and her PhD in 2005 (cum laude). Her research focuses on the biology of obesity as well as the role of corticosteroids in health and disease (cardiometabolic diseases and psychiatric disorders). She is internationally acknowledged for her innovative research with a significant societal impact, which is also shown by extensive (inter)national media attention for her research.
Melisa Saygin
VU
PhD Student
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 -primarily EEG- studies in relation to anxiety, borderline, schizophrenia, dissociation, and misophonia. Her research interests include the physiological pathways through which different psychopathologies get generated, and the precise ambulatory measurement of physiological stress responses.
Susanne Scheibe
RUG
Professor in Organizational Psychology
Susanne Scheibe is Professor and head of the department of Organizational Psychology at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. In her research, she adopts a lifespan perspective on organizational well-being and behavior, with a special focus on how emotional competencies and daily emotion/stress dynamics change across adulthood, and how age-related changes affect people in work settings. Scheibe has published over 60 scientific papers, has supervised over 10 PhD-students and postdocs, and has served as Associate Editor of “Cognition & Emotion”.
Antje Schmitt
RUG
Assistant Professor
Myrthe Schoenmakers
VU
PhD Student
After finishing her master Technical Medicine from the University of Twente, Myrte Schoenmakers joined the SiA team to work on research theme two. Her background focusses on combining scientific medical and technical knowledge for innovating and improving in health care. In line with that, her previous research works shows a variety of topics including techniques ranging from respiratory inductance plethysmography and subcortical electro encephalography to innovative methods, applied in various hospital departments and beyond, all for health care improvement for the individual patient.
Milou Sep
Amsterdam UMC
Postdoc
Dr. Milou Sep is a neuroscientist in the lab of Prof. Christiaan Vinkers (Amsterdam UMC/VUmc) and a psychologist at GGZ inGeest. She is also a visiting postdoc in the lab of Prof. Nikolaos Daskalakis (McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School). Milou’s key interest is the between-individual variation in resilience to stress/trauma and its consequences for psychiatric disorders. She combined clinical and preclinical work in her self-designed PhD project (UMC Utrecht/Dutch Ministry of Defence), for which she acquired a prestigious personal NWO grant (2014). Milou is trained in Biomedical Sciences (BSc 2010), Clinical Psychology (BSc 2012; MSc 2015), and Neuroscience (MSc 2015) at Utrecht University.
Harold Snieder
UMCG
Professor of Genetic Epidemiology
Artemis Stefani
VU
Postdoc
Artemis Stefani is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Biological Psychology at VU Amsterdam. She has previously worked with atypical and neuropsychiatric populations across the lifespan using cognitive, neuroimaging and brain stimulation methods. During her PhD, she investigated individual variability in higher cognitive functions in children that were born preterm through longitudinal designs. She is particularly interested in understanding individual variability in cognition through ecologically valid assessments and identifying markers that could inform theory and intervention work. Artemis is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist by training (PhD, MSc) from University College London.
Anaïs Thijssen
Amsterdam UMC
Research Assistant
Anaïs Thijssen is a research assistant at the Psychiatry department of Amsterdam UMC. She has a Master’s degree in Neuroscience and Psychology. She is especially interested in how genetics, the brain and evolution interact to shape the human mind. Her work focusses mainly on the genetics of psychiatry, where she uses genetics to better understand individual differences between people, but also tries to link the genetic signals to biological insights and evolutionary origin.
Bülent Ündes
VU
PhD Student
Bülent Ündes is a data scientist and economist, currently pursuing his Ph.D. in the quantitative data analytics group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam under the supervision of Mark Hoogendoorn (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Bernard Veldkamp (University of Twente). His research focuses on trustworthy AI, efficient deep learning, and probabilistic machine learning, with a particular interest in the intersection of AI and healthcare. Previously, he worked as a junior lecturer at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He holds two master’s degrees, one in Economics from Lund University in Sweden, and one in Data Science from the Barcelona School of Economics in Spain.
Sjors van de Ven
VU
PhD Student
Sjors van de Ven is a PhD-candidate at the department of Biological Psychology of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In his research, he focuses on improving the methodology of physiological monitoring in ambulatory settings using the VU-AMS.
Christiaan Vinkers
Amsterdam UMC
Professor of Stress and Resilience
Christiaan Vinkers is a psychiatrist and full professor of Stress and Resilience at the Amsterdam UMC and GGZ InGeest. His overall research objective is to better understand, maintain, or even improve resilience in the face of stress, and to use stress and trauma as a transdiagnostic approach within and outside psychiatry. His research has contributed how (traumatic) stress increases the risk for psychiatric disorders and helped to identify who is (not) at risk. He is currently involved in epidemiological studies, experimental designs, and clinical trials to further disentangle and integrate the biological and psychological determinants of stress resilience.
Ying Wang
UT
Assistant professor
Ying Wang is an assistant professor at Biomedical Signals and Systems (BSS) department at University of Twente and the committee member of Dutch Electrical Engineering (EE-NL) council. Ying Wang is an interdisciplinary researcher with the background of electrical engineering and has applied and developed techniques, e.g., multi-modal model-based signal sensing and processing, and physiological system modelling techniques in the healthcare field. She has been developing daily life remote continuous monitoring systems of individual’s physiological signs (e.g., heart activity) and body movement for personalized prevention and management of diseases, e.g., epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, hip fracture, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and mental diseases.
Noa van Zwieten
Amsterdam UMC
PhD Student
Noa van Zwieten is a PhD candidate at the psychiatry department of Amsterdam UMC, location VUmc. She graduated from the Research Master Clinical and Health Psychology at Leiden University (cum laude). Her interest lies in the development of mental disorders, with a particular focus on the differences that emerge between individuals and over time. Within the Stress in Action project she focusses on comparing the emotional, biological, behavioral and cognitive dimensions of daily-life stress between persons with and without mental disorders to understand the crucial aspects that contribute to mental disorder development.