Assistant Professor Archives

Kayla is an assistant professor in the Erasmus SYNC Lab. Her work focuses on how adolescents and young adults grow up in a complex and rapidly changing world, marked by various societal challenges (e.g., COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, poverty). She specifically examines how adolescent and young adult wellbeing is shaped by socioeconomic hardship and future uncertainty. Kayla aims to shed light on how the developing brain adapts to challenges in the social environment, and how such neural challenges may foster resilience. Which vulnerabilities put some adolescents at risk to be disproportionably hit by societal challenges, and are there protective factors that might buffer against the potential negative impact on wellbeing. Additionally, Kayla investigates self-disclosure in the context of societal topics, which may be viewed as political or controversial (e.g., should adolescents aged 16 or 17 years have the right to vote?).

She is co-founder and social media officer of the YoungXperts youth participation platform. She is passionate about connecting science to society and policy. Kayla uses participatory approaches to actively involve youth in science and policy. She also engages in science communication and outreach activities.

Kayla is member of the ambition team on youth participation. Since 2020, Kayla is member of the Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Committee of the international Flux Society. She co-leads the Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (BIPOC) affinity group. Kayla was awarded the PhD Excellence Award for Best Societal Impact by the Erasmus Graduate School of Social Sciences and the Humanities in 2022. She was also awarded a travel grant by Flux Society in 2022. Together with her YoungXperts colleagues she received the Open Science Award for the collaborative work on inclusive youth participation within the YoungXperts platform. In 2022 Kayla was selected as Faces of Science by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), the Young Academy (De Jonge Akademie), and NEMO Kennislink.Green has a background in psychology (Utrecht University, 2015). After obtaining her bachelor degree, she continued with the research master Neuroscience & Cognition (2018) and the clinical master Neuropsychology (2017) at Utrecht University. She did her clinical internship at the Neurology and Geriatrics Department of the Spijkenisse Medisch Centrum, where is also obtained her BAPD (certificate in psychodiagnostics). She obtained her PhD in 2024 (cum laude) at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Under supervision of prof. dr. Eveline Crone and dr. Suzanne van de Groep. Kayla examined the socioeconomic, social and neural determinants of wellbeing across adolescence and young adulthood.

Lysanne te Brinke is an Assistant Professor at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research focuses on understanding how the interplay between inter-personal and inter-societal experiences and expectations may leads to adaptive (i.e., community engagement, contributing to society) and maladaptive outcomes (i.e., displaying antisocial behavior, feeling excluded from society). She is currently working on an individual VENI grant (NWO) to examine how adolescents can become agents of change, by zooming on contributions to close others and contributions to the broader society.

Michelle Achterberg is an assistant professor at the Department of Psychology, Education and Child Studies (DPECS) at Erasmus University Rotterdam and affiliated with the Erasmus SYNC-lab. Her research line focusses on the nature, nurture and neural mechanisms of social emotion regulation in childhood and adolescence.

Michelle is a junior PI on the Leiden Consortium on Individual Development (L-CID), a large longitudinal twin study on brain development in childhood and adolescence. Within this study Michelle specifically focusses on longitudinal brain development and its relation to social information processing and behavioral control. Additionally, she has expertise on functional and structural brain connectivity and investigates how brain development is influenced by genes and the environment.

Michelle has a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and a Research Master’s degree in Neuroscience. During her masters, Michelle worked as a research intern at the department of child psychiatry, University Medical Center Utrecht, where she gained her first experience with neuroimaging in children. During the second year of her studies, she joined the Brian and Development Research Center at Leiden University as a research assistant.

Following her passion for developmental neuroscience, Michelle started her PhD project in 2014 as part of the Leiden Consortium on Individual Development at Leiden University under supervision of Prof. dr. Eveline Crone, Prof. dr. Marian Bakermans- Kranenburg and Dr. Anna van Duijvenvoorde. Michelle received her PhD “Nature, nurture and neural mechanisms of social emotion regulation” in 2020 cum laude. For her PhD research, she received the Dutch Neurofederation PhD Thesis Prize in 2021.

During her postdoc at the SYNC lab (2020-2022), Michelle aimed to bridge the gap between fundamental science and societal challenges by incorporating co-creation methods to her studies, such as brain storm sessions and living labs. As an assistant professor, Michelle remains involved in SYNC’s research projects and societal impact initiatives.

Suzanne van de Groep is an assistant professor at the department of Psychology, Education, and Child Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam and affiliated with the Erasmus SYNC Lab. Her research mainly focuses on the behavioral and neural development of prosocial behaviors in adolescence.

Prosocial behaviors (i.e., behaviors that benefit others) such as giving, cooperating, and helping are essential for forming and maintaining social relationships, which is an important developmental goal in adolescence. Suzanne’s work specifically focuses on the development of different types of prosocial behaviors, and how this is shaped by social contexts and individual differences. Her most recent endeavors include the investigation of social temporal discounting, online prosocial behaviors, longitudinal brain development within individuals related to giving, as well as adolescents’ wellbeing.

Suzanne has a background in developmental psychology and completed her research masters in Leiden in 2016 (cum laude). During her PhD, Suzanne has played a large role in setting up an ERC consolidator project called ‘Brainlinks’, a longitudinal three-wave fMRI study in which 142 adolescents and their parents were followed over the course of several years. To gain a better understanding of prosocial development, this project includes fMRI tasks, experimental tasks, questionnaires, hormone data, and daily diaries (see Projects for a video on the Brainlinks project). In February 2022, she defended her PhD dissertation called ‘Growing in Generosity? Unraveling the effects of benefactor-, beneficiary-, and situational characteristics on the development of giving and its neural correlates in adolescence’, which was supervised by Prof. Eveline Crone and Dr. Kiki Zanolie. After her PhD, she did a 9-month postdoc at the Erasmus SYNC lab to extend her fundamental developmental neuroscience research with citizen science projects and a broader perspective on how adolescents’ role in society shapes their social behavior and wellbeing.

Apart from gaining a better understanding of prosocial development, Suzanne has a passion for connecting science and society, for example through science communication and citizen science projects, as well as mentoring, talent development, and recognition and rewards in academia.

Suzanne was awarded several grants and prizes, including a grant to visit UCLA during her PhD, two EGSH PhD Excellence Awards (best societal impact and best poster), a DPECS Dragon’s Den seed fund, and a NWA Science Communication Grant (together with her YoungXperts colleagues).