About me

I completed a bachelor’s degree in Language and Cognition at Utrecht University in the Netherlands before gaining admission to the 2-years master’s degree in Cognitive Neuroscience at Radboud University Nijmegen. 

After graduating from the MSc programme in 2014, I was offered a PhD position at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour in Nijmegen. In my project “The emerging sense of agency in early infancy”, I combined theories and methods from philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, developmental psychology and artificial intelligence to develop a framework for studying subjective experiences in pre-verbal infants, evaluate the developmental suitability of theories of the sense of agency and experimentally test the hypotheses that followed from the assessment. In 2017 (the final year of my PhD project) I received a Christine Mohrmann Stipend, awarded to the top 10 female PhD students across all disciplines at Radboud University, for a research visit at Monash University in the philosophy department. At Monash University I was embedded in the research group of Prof. Jakob Hohwy and collaborated on a project with Prof. Tim Bayne. 

In addition to empirical approaches in cognitive (neuro)science and developmental psychology,  I believe computational modeling and developmental robotics offer promising directions and opportunities for developmental cognitive (neuro)science. I organized a five-day ‘Perspectives on Developmental Robotics’ workshop within the event series of the Lorentz Center in Leiden. 

Since January 2019, I work as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Trinity College Dublin with Prof. Rhodri Cusack as part of the EU-funded FOUNDCOG project. In this project, we aim to understand how the human mind develops by investigating the foundations of cognition in infants’ first year of life. The combination of methods, i.e., computational modeling, machine learning, neuroimaging and online behavioral testing, offers a unique opportunity to model the interaction between various learning strategies and the corresponding sensory experiences on representations in the developing brain and experimentally test the predictions generated by the computational models. 

In February 2020, I was awarded a MSCA Individual Fellowship for a 2-year project on the influence of parent-child interaction on full-term and pre-term infants' learning through visual attention.