While studying psychology, I realized that my interests leaned more towards research than clinical work. During my master’s I therefore decided to do a research internship, and I ended up at the department of Anatomy and Neurosciences of the VUmc, where I looked at the MEG-based brain networks of patients with MS in relation to their cognition. It is through this internship that I met Linda, who offered me the opportunity to work in her team.
I have thus been at the lab for a while, writing my thesis on multimodal multilayer networks in healthy subjects. During this time I was also employed as a research assistant for a short period of time, acquiring imaging (MRI, MEG, and EEG) and neuropsychological data for that same project.
During my PhD I will continue this line of research, working with Fernando and Linda to elucidate the relation between cognition and multilayer networks in patients with MS, stroke, and glioma. Additionally, we will infer ‘virtual lesions’ in healthy people through TMS, in an attempt to better understand of the impact of lesions on the (multilayer) brain network and cognition.
I’m excited to get to work with a broad range of people from different backgrounds and with different areas of expertise, and I hope that, at the end of my PhD, we will have contributed something meaningful to the understanding of how brain networks govern cognition – and perhaps even found some indication of how to use this knowledge to our advantage.
Multiscale Network Neuroscience 