Ilse van de Groep is a Postdoctoral researcher at the SYNC lab and the Leiden Consortium on Individual Development. Her research mainly focuses on the behavioral and neural development of antisocial behavior in young adulthood.
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 witha 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 will defend her dissertation called “Resisting, Desisting or Persisting? Neural Correlates of Antisocial and Psychopathic Pathways in Early Adulthood”.
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.
Stephan is a part-time postdoctoral research engineer at the Erasmus SYNC lab, where he focuses on building reproducible analysis pipelines and data management processes for neuroimaging data.
Stephan has an M.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering and Robotics from Stellenbosch University in South Africa. He worked as a commercial and software engineer for four years in two industries (Industrial Automation and Enterprise Mobility) before moving to the Netherlands with the goal of conducting research in neuroscience. His doctoral research at the Eindhoven University of Technology and in collaboration with Philips Research focused on developing new acquisition and signal processing methods for functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that allow improved tracking and visualisation of brain activity in real-time.
Stephan is passionate about brains, accessible education, and making scientific practice more transparent and inclusive. Throughout his doctoral research, he has been active in the Dutch network of Open Science Communities and he founded OpenMR Benelux, a community working on wider adoption of open science practices in MRI research through talks, discussions, workshops and hackathons. Stephan has since continued this passion as a Research Data and Software Engineer at the Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, where he works on software solutions for neuroinformatics and decentralised research data management.
