Simone Dobbelaar is a PhD candidate at the SYNC lab at Erasmus University Rotterdam and the Brain and Development Research Center at Leiden University. During her PhD, Simone focuses on the role of the social environment in the neurocognitive development of social competence. Specifically, she is interested in the development of prosocial behavior and aggression regulation, and the co-occurence of these behaviors. Moreover, she tries to discover whether changes in the social environment, such as parenting behavior, can influence the development of prosocial behavior and emotion regulation on both a behavioral and neural level. Simone studies these questions in twins that are followed from middle childhood to early adolescence, as part of the longitudinal twin study of the Leiden Consortium on Individual Development. Her PhD project is supervised by Prof. dr. Eveline Crone, Dr. Anna van Duijvenvoorde and Dr. Michelle Achterberg.
During her bachelors Psychobiology and Psychology, Simone developed an interest in research that bridges the gap between brain and behavior. She obtained her Reseach Master Psychology at the University of Amsterdam with a specialization in Brain and Cognition and Clinical Psychology (2018, cum laude). Her master thesis in the Emotional Memory Lab of the University of Amsterdam focused on the role of context in declarative memory interference and was awarded as research master thesis of the year.
Kayla Green is a PhD candidate in the Erasmus SYNC Lab. Her work focuses on the behavioural and neural predictors of wellbeing during adolescence and young adulthood. She investigates the short- and long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescents’ mental health: which vulnerabilities put some adolescents at risk to be disproportionably hit by the pandemic, and are there protective factors that might buffer against the negative impact of the pandemic on mental health? In addition, she leads the longitudinal Braintime project on brain development during adolescence. She aims to shed light on how structural brain development and neural activation in subcortical brain regions during adolescence may lead to greater wellbeing later in life depending on one’s social environment.
She is co-founder and social media officer of the YoungXperts youth participation platform. She is passionate about connecting science to society and policy. Green uses living lab methods, like citizen science, to stimulate the combination of impact-driven research and more (fundamental) curiosity-driven research in the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience.
Green is also a member of the Diversity & Inclusion office, where she works on projects that are aimed at increasing the proportion of underrepresented groups in higher education and improving the success and wellbeing of underrepresented EUR-students.
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).
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.
