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”.

Lysanne te Brinke is a postdoctoral researcher at the Erasmus SYNC lab. She is interested in how adolescents navigate complex societal challenges (i.e., social inequality crisis, climate crisis, covid-19 crisis). Specifically, her work focuses on empowering adolescents to speak up (i.e., raising their voice) and to act act up (i.e., prosocial societal behavior). 

Lysanne is currently leading an intervention study, in which she aims to examine how changes in emotional reactivity during adolescence result in opportunities for prosocial behavior, such as increases in societal contributions. She is co-founder of our YoungXperts youth participation platform and an advocate of citizen science. In her work, she aims to include the voices and creative ideas of adolescents. Moreover, she examines how innovative approaches (i.e., living labs) foster the implementation of scientific findings, while at the same time enabling adolescents to feel connected to – and heard in – society. 

Aside from her passion for bridging science and practice, Lysanne actively contributes to the training and collaboration opportunities of early career researchers. She is appointed as president elect of the early career researchers union of the European Association for Developmental Psychology. 

Lysanne has a background in developmental psychology and completed both a research master (2015) and clinical master (2016, cum laude) at Utrecht University. During her studies, she did a clinical internship at Curium-LUMC Leiden and obtained a certificate of psychological assessment (BAPD). In her PhD project at Utrecht University (2016-2020), Lysanne developed an experimental emotion regulation training for adolescents with externalizing behavior problems, and examined the relative effects of different treatment approaches, through the use of micro-trial designs. She also gained international experience: several travel grants enabled her to work at the Harvard Lab for Youth Mental and the Sydney Child Behavior Clinic. She successfully defended her PhD thesis “Interventions under the microscope: Emotion regulation as a treatment element for externalizing problems in adolescence” in March 2021.

Eduard Klapwijk is a part-time postdoctoral researcher at the Erasmus SYNC lab since 2020. A central question in his research is: Why do most teenagers grow up to be kind to others while a proportion engage in harmful, antisocial and risky behaviors? He is very much interested in how we can address these questions using neuroimaging methods in a robust, reproducible way. His current focus as a postdoc at Erasmus University is to determine the optimal sample size in developmental studies for a range of fMRI tasks.

Eduard was raised in Rotterdam and went to Leiden to be trained in developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience (Research Master at Leiden University, 2011, Cum Laude). During his PhD (2011-2016) he investigated the neural mechanisms underlying social-emotional dysfunction in conduct disorder and autism spectrum disorders at Leiden University Medical Center. He then worked one-and-a-half year as a data-driven management consultant, after which he returned to academia. From 2017-2020, he worked as a postdoc in the Brain and Development Research Center at Leiden University where he worked on large-scale collaborative projects focused on brain morphology. Since 2019, he is a co-chair of the ENIGMA Working Group on Antisocial Behavior, an international collaboration aimed at performing large-scale meta- and mega-analyses of neuroimaging data. Since May 2021, Eduard is also employed as a Research Data Steward at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioral Sciences.