Yara Toenders is an assistant professor at the Erasmus SYNC lab. She is interested in mental health during development from childhood to young adulthood, and biological and societal factors that affect adolescents’ mental health. In her work, she closely collaborated with youth themselves and societal partners such as Trimbos-Institute and MIND Us.

Yara previously worked as a Healthy Start Research Fellow Mental Wellbeing of Youth, a collaboration between the Erasmus University Rotterdam, Erasmus Medical Centre and TU Delft. Here, she worked on projects on mental wellbeing interventions at schools, in co-creation with youth. She is also involved in the at home and in the locker consortium, where the effect of phone bans on mental health of youth is examined.

Yara did her PhD at the Centre for Youth Mental Health at the University of Melbourne in Australia, where 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.