Biography

I have always been intrigued by how our understanding of the normal brain is aided - and in fact began - by studying abnormal brain functioning. This inspired me to do a master in Clinical Neuropsychology (graduated cum laude in 2009), for which I did a clinical internship at the department of Neurology at the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam. Fascinating as it was, I nevertheless began to realize that I was more interested in doing experimental research. I therefore applied for a 2-year research master program (graduated cum laude in 2010), during which I performed research in the ACACia lab at the UvA and the Despolab at UC Berkeley. I additionally worked as a teaching assistant and as a MRI/ research assistant, the latter allowing me to become acquainted with various types of neuroimaging research. In March 2010 I started my PhD project in the lab of Prof. Merel Kindt, co-supervised by Dr. H. Steven Scholte.

Research

The PhD project focuses on the neural basis of (the plasticity) of fear memory. Combining fMRI with fear conditioning, our first aim was to gain a better understanding of how associative networks change as people acquire fears. To this end, we examined the similarity between stimulus-evoked response patterns (a form of multi-voxel pattern analysis, or MVPA) on a trial-by-trial basis, to monitor the development of fear associations over time. In a second study we again used this method to demonstrate that the long-term behavioral expression of fear memory can be predicted from changes in neural patterns at the time of learning, a few weeks earlier. These results are fascinating given that the behavioral expression of fear (as measured by pupil dilation responses) during learning did not predict later fear memory. This suggests a dissociation between the actual expression of fear at a certain moment in time and the subsequent consolidation of that fear. These findings give rise to numerous new questions, some of which we are currently addressing.

• CV

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