Yara Toenders is a postdoctoral researcher at the Erasmus SYNC lab. She is interested in mental health during development from childhood to young adulthood.
Yara previously did her PhD at the Centre for Youth Mental Health at the University of Melbourne in Australia. During her PhD she focused on depression in young people, more specifically on the onset of depression and the heterogeneity of depression. She was also involved in the international ENIGMA MDD consortium, a worldwide effort to combine data to increase our understanding of depression.
Before her PhD, Yara obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Neuroscience and finished a Neurobiology research master at the University in Amsterdam. During this Master she first gained experience with neuroimaging in young people. At the Amsterdam Medical Centre, she studied brain connectivity in children with a posttraumatic stress disorder.
Ilse van de Groep is a Healthy Start Fellow working in the SYNC lab and the Clinical Psychology department of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research mainly focuses on the behavioral and neural development of antisocial behavior in young adulthood, and on strategies to support and motivate young adults with antisocial behavior and addiction problems to pursue their own long-term goals.
Ilse is passionate about finding mechanistic explanations for complex social behavior and greatly enjoys the most creative aspects of research and science communication. She often uses her creative skills to share newly acquired knowledge with a wider audience (e.g. blogging, workshops, e-magazines) or to create platforms and supporting media to enable this (e.g. websites, graphic design, photography).
Ilse has a background in Social and Health Psychology and completed her research Master in Utrecht in 2016. After graduating, she worked as a research assistant at the Experimental Psychopathology lab in Utrecht. In her PhD project (2018-2022), Ilse examined several mechanisms that underlie distinct developmental trajectories of social and antisocial behavior in emerging adulthood, with a specific focus on the neural correlates of self-concept, vicarious reward learning, social evaluation and aggression regulation. She was supervised by prof. Eveline Crone, dr. Marieke Bos, prof. Lucres Nauta-Jansen and prof. Arne Popma. In April 2023, she defended her dissertation called “Resisting, Desisting or Persisting? Neural Correlates of Antisocial and Psychopathic Pathways in Early Adulthood”.
