I am a postdoctoral researcher with a background in experimental psychology, cognitive neuroscience and philosophy. Currently, I work in the Sleep & Cognition Group led by Eus van Someren at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience. My current work focuses on the interplay of insomnia, anxiety and hyperarousal. Hyperarousal is intricately related to poor sleep - tension and worry prior to bedtime prevent us from getting a good night's rest. At the same time, sound sleep is vital for the processing of our worries overnight. As part of my postdoc, I am thinking about the directionality of this relationship. How exactly does daytime anxiety carry into sleepless nights? And which biological mechanisms can explain why restless sleep perpetuates anxious feelings overnight?

Previously, I worked on how the brain processes information during sleep at the University of Cambridge and investigated prediction errors in schizophrenia at the UMC Utrecht. During my PhD at the University of Würzburg, I focused on the behavioural and neural mechanisms underlying attentional shifts to humans in our environment.