The mission of the Junior Board is to bring together junior scholars (master, PhD, post-doc) in Psychological Sciences from all around Belgium. The two main goals of the Junior Board are 1) to foster scientific collaboration between junior and senior researchers, mainly at a national level, and 2) to address the specific difficulties junior researchers might face during their early academic careers.
The mission of the Junior Board is to bring together junior scholars (master, PhD, post-doc) in Psychological Sciences from all around Belgium. As such, we aim to represent and serve junior scholars from all Belgian universities and all domains within Psychology. The Junior Board adheres to the same principles as the BAPS Executive Committee with which it interacts closely.
Additionally, the Junior board aims at intensively promoting Open Science within the field of Psychology, and to raise awareness about researchers’ ecological footprint, especially when travelling abroad. Finally, the Junior board aims at reflecting on how new (social) communication tools (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, blogs) can help to disseminate scientific research to the broader scientific community and the general public.
The BAPS Junior Board is a partner of the Belgian Federation of Psychology Students, a new non-profit student organisation that strives towards a strong network between Belgian psychology students across different universities in Belgium. Check their website here: https://www.bfps.be/
Maura is a PhD student at the Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology at Ghent University. Her PhD focuses on social-cognitive skills, such as imitation and perspective-taking, in adults with and without autism. She investigates this using a learning perspective, starting from the idea that imitation and perspective-taking are learned (operant) behaviors with an important social function.
Sofia is a research assistant at the ULB, which allows her to carry out her PhD in political psychology and to teach statistics to undergraduate psychology students. Her research project focuses on the perception of sexism within political discourses and includes a cross-cultural comparison.
Valentina is a PhD student in Work and Organisational Psychology at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). She studies burnout from a dynamic network perspective. Unlike traditional burnout approaches, network theory focuses on the symptoms themselves (how they develop over-time and form relationships). Network theory offers new ways to study burnout development, which could be particularly interesting for prevention. Valentina is currently developing a tool that is suitable for network research on burnout (message her and she'll gladly tell you why that's important). She wishes for her thesis to challenge current theory as well as lay the foundation for more effective prevention.
Federico is a postdoc whose work focuses on neural alignment between interacting individuals and the signal processing of physiological and neural signals.
Anna is a PhD researcher in psycholinguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Her research focuses on multilingual language control, the mental process that allows multilinguals to handle multiple languages in different contexts. The main aim of her research is to investigate the underlying mechanisms of language control and explore its connection to other cognitive processes through behavioural studies.
Femke holds a Master's Degree in Work- and Industrial Psychology from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and is currently pursuing a PhD focused on identifying individual triggers in burnout development, aiming to prevent its onset. Her research explores key job demands, job resources, and burnout dimensions for various individuals, analyzing their interactions through dynamic frameworks to better understand and mitigate burnout.
In addition to her role as a PhD researcher, Femke teaches several statistics courses to first- and second-year Bachelor students in Psychology at the VUB.
Cloé Rose is a PhD candidate in Clinical Psychology at the University of Mons, in collaboration with Ghent University. Her research examines empathic accuracy, the ability to infer a partner’s unspoken thoughts and feelings in real time, within romantic relationships. Through her work, she seeks to understand how motivational processes shape empathic accuracy, with the broader aim of informing interventions that foster emotional attunement and strengthen couple relationships.
Idhuna is a clinical psychologist and former teacher, currently engaged as a PhD researcher in Work and Organizational Psychology at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Her research explores the development of burnout from a transdiagnostic perspective, aiming to identify vulnerability profiles and contribute to personalized prevention strategies. In addition to her academic work, she is currently expanding her clinical expertise through specialized training in trauma therapy.
Mathilde is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University studying arousal and attention regulation in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). She earned a PhD (2020-2023) in Engineering Sciences with a focus on clinical neuropsychology and speech acoustics, researching emotion perception in speech among individuals with autism. She is fascinated by the ways neuropsychological traits interact with the environment, and by applying signalprocessing and AI methods to neural and behavioural data to better understand these dynamics.
Matilda is a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven in Brain and Cognition Research Unit. Her research involves using non-invasive brain stimulation to investigate cognition. Her research focuses primarily on transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and vision, with special interest in visual categorisation. She obtained her PhD at The University of Queensland, Australia.
Sofía is a PhD student at the Moral and Social Brain lab in Ghent University and at UR2NF in Université Libre de Bruxelles. She has a master's in Theoretical and Experimental Psychology as well as in Statistical Data Analysis. In 2024 she received an FWO grant for her project Minds in Conflict, in which she researches the emotional and non-emotional processing in victims and perpetrators of the Colombian Internal Armed Conflict.
Doctoral students at UGent, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Université Libre de Bruxelles, UCLouvain, University of Liège who become a member of the BAPS Junior Board can receive credits for this activity from their doctoral school. Please consult the doctoral school of your university for more information.
