Tenured Assistant Professor, Neuroscientist
Clinical Neuropsychology
Vrije University Amsterdam, Netherlands
Leader of the National fNIRS Consortium (NfC)
I am an award-winning, early-career neuroscientist who uses fNIRS to study how the social environment shapes human behaviors and brain processes. My research intersects traditions from Naturalistic Neurosceince, Cultural Neuroscience, and Cultural Psychiatry. My primary focus is on naturalistic social interaction, which includes normal variations in adaptive social processes and extends to the range of social and adaptive difficulties seen across psychiatric disorders (e.g., autism, schizophrenia, frontotemporal dementia). Social interaction processes are highly fluid and contextualized by culture and the environment; they dynamically change to adapt to new information and accommodate interpersonal cues and emotions. These ever-shifting contexts vary in baseline and trajectory across individuals and situations. Therefore, at the root of my research, is an interest in human diversity and how adapting to social contexts further changes us as individuals. This line of inquiry can help improve clinical and medical treatments. In clinical settings, adaptive social cognition is necessary for successful medical outcomes, such as accurately reporting symptoms to a physician or benefitting from talk therapies. Patients who struggle to adaptively process social interaction may also struggle to report their symptoms or to benefit from conversation-based therapies. Understanding social adaptability in patients who experience difficulties can help optimize their medical outcomes.
These priorities extend into my academic service activities. I’m involved with multiple organizations and special interest groups that promote diversity and inclusion in neuroscience and psychiatry. After all, how can we make scientific claims about what makes us human if entire populations and perspectives are unrepresented? Representation has two faces in the social sciences: who is doing the research and who is being studied. I volunteer my time to improve both and work with scientists and participants from all walks of life. I am a Cultural SIG member for the International Neuropsychological Society (INS) and Regional Chair (Europe) for the International Cultural Neuroscience Society (ICNS). I’m on the Editorial Board for Nature’s journal Scientific Reports. I have also been working with the World Association for Cultural Psychiatry (WACP) for over a decade to promote the publication of mental health research from global studies and mental health research and case studies from countries that are underrepresented in scientific journals.
I have conducted studies within and across numerous countries, including Canada, Denmark, Georgia, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Nepal, the Netherlands, and the USA. My research methods primarily combine neuroimaging (fNIRS, fMRI, EEG), with naturalistic experiments and cultural consensus analysis. Recent experiments emphasize naturalistic neuroscience methods.
My Ph.D. in Neuroscience (IPN) was completed at McGill University (Montreal, Canada), where I received two of the nation’s most respected scholarships - the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship (CIHR) and the Tomlinson/Lloyd Carr-Harris Medical Fellowship (McGill Medicine). The majority of my research was conducted at the Douglas Mental Health Institute and through the FPR-UCLA-McGill Program in Cultural Psychiatry, with a focus on psychosis. I also hold an M.Sc. degree in Neuroscience and a clinical M.Sc. in Mental Health, and focused on autism during both.
I am a Tenured Assistant Professor at of Clinical Neuropsychology at Vrije University Amsterdam (Netherlands). My joint affiliation at the Interacting Minds Centre (IMC) at Aarhus University (Denmark) where I formerly worked as an Adjunct professor for the Cognitive Science Program, ended in August 2023. In 2019, I helped open the first all-ages fNIRS research laboratory in Denmark with the assistance of Dr. Andreas Roepstorff. In September 2022, I replaced Mario Braakman as Editor-In-Chief for the WCPRR. In 2023, I launched the National fNIRS Consortium (NfC) for the Netherlands.
