BIO

I am a research fellow at Ghent University and University College London as well as a consultant at BeBrain. I am passionate about people's minds. In particular, I love understanding how people make decisions, which unfortunately do not always improve their well-being and mental health. For example, why do people persistently consume negative information on social media despite they get anxious or sad? Or why do people continue to repeat behaviors that are against what they believe or want? 

My passion for exploring people's decision-making has been a driving force throughout my academic journey. 

At the beginning of my Ph.D., I convinced my supervisor (Prof. Axel Cleeremans, Universitè libre de Bruxelles) of the importance of studying decision-making across various analytical levels (behavioral, neural, computational, clinical). He shared my enthusiasm and supported me in obtaining my own funding (F.R.S-fNRS grant). However, both my research interests and the interdisciplinary methodologies I wanted to apply extended beyond his expertise. To bridge this gap and ensure the implementation of my projects, I was successful in finding the right collaborators who advised on neuroscientific (Prof. William Alexander, Florida Atlantic University), computational (Prof Angela Yu, University California San Diego), and clinical (Dr. Xavier Noel, Universitè libre de Bruxelles) issues associated with my interdisciplinary projects. 

After successfully completing my Ph.D., I accepted a job as a research fellow with Prof. Tali Sharot (University College London & Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to work on how people make information-seeking decisions. Soon, however, I came to the realization that my true passion lay in pursuing my own research ideas using interdisciplinary methods. She supported this choice and accepted to be part of my FWO project as a collaborator. As the project also required computational expertise, I also started collaborating with Prof. Tom Verguts (Ghent University). 

At present, I maintain affiliations with both University College London and Ghent University, albeit under my own fellowship and with my own students. 

Parallel to my scientific career, in the last years, I started to use the latest insights from my research field to improve companies' decisions and solve public policy issues. This is why in 2020 I founded BeBrain - a behavioral science consultancy based in Brussels.