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/
Yesim is a Phd student at the Health Psychology group at KU Leuven. Her research is on aversive reactions to innocuous sounds with a focus on three conditions: misophonia, hyperacusis and bothersome tinnitus. She uses qualitative assessment tools and experimental research designs to study the etiology of three conditions while investigating the possible underlying learning accounts (i.e. referential learning).
Personal website
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.
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.
Maura is a PhD student at the Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology at Ghent University. Her PhD focuses on how imitative behavior is influenced by social factors, such as eye contact or the social group the interaction partners belong to, in adults with and without autism. She investigates this using a learning perspective, starting from the idea that imitation is learned (operant) behavior with an important social function.
María Sánchez is a PhD student in psycholinguistics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels. Her research focuses on bilingual language control, the mechanism that allows bilinguals to produce the language of their choice at will. Her main aim is to investigate several of the underlying processes of language control in more ecologically valid contexts. To do so, the project relies on Virtual Reality to create experimental setups that more closely resemble real life language production, while still maintaining experimental control.
"I am a research assistant at the ULB, which allows me to carry out my PhD in political psychology and to teach statistics to undergraduate psychology students. My research project focuses on sexism within the political sphere (attitudes towards politicians, policies, etc.) and aims to include a cross-cultural comparison".
Sarah is a PhD student in psycholinguistics at the Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). She investigates multilingual language control, the process that minimises cross-language interference during multilingual language processing, and its influence on second language learning. Her PhD project thus offers more insights into how cognitive mechanisms in the multilingual mind are linked to the acquisition of a new language.
Federico is currently doing his post-doc in Belgium 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 synchronization. Federico earned
his PhD in psychobiology and physiological psychology from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy.
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).
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.
