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 perspecitve-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.
Valentina is a PhD student in Work and Organisational Psychology (WOP) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). She studies burnout from a dynamic network perspective. The key idea is that the interactions among burnout symptoms is what makes a person experience a burned-out state. She wishes for her thesis to challenge current theory as well as lay the foundation for more accurate burnout treatment and prevention.
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.
Federico is a post-doc at the University of Mons, within an Excellence of Science (EOS) project sponsored by the FWO-FNRS foundation. His main interest focuses on electrophysiology and the development of research paradigms to assess inter-individual synchrony.
Michel holds a Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology from Lausanne University in Switzerland. He is currently doing a PhD with the Excellence of Science (EOS) scholarship sponsored by the FWO-FNRS foundation which aims at studying the transmission of resilience within families. His thesis focuses on triadic behavioral synchrony and most specifically the voice synchrony as well as attachment and resilience.
In addition to his research interest, Michel Sfeir completed several clinical training such as: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), psycho-oncology, Dialecticla Behavioral Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Trauma Focused Therapy. His activity also expands into several volunteering position in NGO’s in Lebanon and Switzerland.
Jellina Prinsen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences at KU Leuven. She obtained her PhD in Biomedical Sciences in 2020. Her research focuses on the neural substrates of cardiac autonomic responding and brain-heart interactions, both in healthy individuals and in individuals diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
Alicia Ramos is a postdoctoral researcher in school and developmental psychology at KU Leuven and the University of Antwerp. Her research has focused primarily on motivational and learning development of high-ability students in the transition between levels of education (i.e primary to secondary education and secondary to higher education).
Alicia currently splits her time between two inter-university projects. One project aids secondary school students in their study choice process for higher education through an interactive online tool (https://columbus.onderwijskiezer.be/over-ons/), and the second project supports schools in developing evidence-informed practices to meet the learning needs of high-ability students (https://www.projecttalent.be/ondersteuningsbeleid-csf).
Alice is a PhD student in clinical psychology at UCLouvain. She works on parental burnout and why and in which case it leads to detrimental parenting behaviors towards children.
Her aim with her PhD is to bring new insights that can have direct clinical and societal implications.
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.
Hong Xiao is a 4th-year PhD student in the Psychology and Cognition Lab at the Université de Liège. She comes from Chongqing, a beautiful city in China. Her doctoral thesis is about the coding of serial order information in verbal working memory.
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.
