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.