PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Freek van Ede
Associate Professor
Freek obtained his PhD in 2014 from the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour (Radboud University Nijmegen) where he worked with Eric Maris, Ole Jensen, and Floris de Lange. He then received a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship and a Newton International Fellowship and spent five years as a post-doctoral research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity (University of Oxford) in the Brain & Cognition Lab of Kia Nobre. In 2020, Freek was awarded an ERC Starting Grant to found the Proactive Brain Lab at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, and in 2022 he received an NWO Vidi grant to expand the lab. Freek has received several awards and recognitions, including the Young Investigator Awards from the Dutch Society for Brain and Cognition (NVP, 2022), the British Association for Cognitive Neuroscience (BACN, 2023) and the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS, 2023). Freek currently serves on the editorial board of Vision, and on the editorial advisory boards of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Progress in Neurobiology, and Visual Cognition. He is co-chair of the Amsterdam Graduate Network for Cognitive Neuroscience, serves as PhD candidate advisor at the Faculty of Behavioural and Movement Sciences, and teaches the research-master course on Cognitive Electrophysiology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
POST-DOC
Sisi Wang
Sisi obtained her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience in 2019 from East China Normal University where she worked with Yixuan Ku. She then worked as a postdoc from 2020 to 2022 at Beijing Normal University and Vanderbilt University with Gui Xue and Geoffrey F. Woodman. In the Proactive Brain Lab, Sisi uses electroencephalography (EEG) and eye-tracking to investigate how internal selective attention influences working-memory representations.
PHD CANDIDATES
Rose Nasrawi
Rose obtained a master degree in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the University of Amsterdam in 2020. Within the Proactive Brain Lab, Rose investigates the action-oriented nature of visual working memory, and its neural signatures, mainly using electroencephalography (EEG).
Baiwei Liu
Baiwei obtained his master degree in Cognitive Neuropsychology from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2020. In the Proactive Brain Lab, Baiwei combines eye-tracking and electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate the links between microsaccades and EEG signatures of spatial attention inside working memory, and to track the transformations in working memory that serve anticipated task goals.
Eelke de Vries
Eelke obtained his master degree in Cognitive Science in 2018 from the University of Trento in Italy and Osnabrück University in Germany. In the Proactive Brain Lab, Eelke uses microsaccadic markers of internally directed selective attention to investigate the roles and properties of space and time in visual working memory.
Daniela Gresch
Daniela obtained her master degree in Neuro-cognitive Psychology from LMU Munich in 2018 and is currently a PhD student in the Brain & Cognition Lab at the University of Oxford. Being co-supervised by Freek, Daniela investigates the behavioural and neural signatures of the dynamic interplay between internal and external attention, as well as the modulation thereof by temporal expectations.
Babak Chawoush
Babak obtained his master degree in Artificial Intelligence from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2021. In the Proactive Brain Lab, Babak develops and employs combined virtual-reality + eye-tracking experiments to study the principles of visual working memory and selective attention in immersive, dynamic, and 3-dimensional settings.
RESEARCH ASSISTANT
Sofia Alexopoulou
Sofia obtained her bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the NKUA in Athens (2019) and afterwards specialised in clinical neuropsychology. Since 2021 she is a master student in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences program (Cognitive Neuroscience track) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). In the Proactive Brain Lab she conducted her first masters project and currently assists in participant recruitment and data collection.
MASTER STUDENTS
Eleni Evangelidi (master-thesis research project)
Betül Karabaş (master-thesis research project)
Anna van Harmelen (master-thesis research project)
Abel Puigseslloses (master research project)
Joelle Simon (master research project)
Mare Hamelink (bachelor-thesis research project)
Flavia Ercole (bachelor-thesis research project)
(We are generally open to hosting additional master-level research projects)
LAB ALUMNI (since 2020)
Gaspar Perez-Ayora (master-thesis research project, 2022)
Ruiheng Zhang (master-thesis research project, 2022)
Mika Mautner-Rohde (master research project)
Sofia Alexopoulou (master research project, 2022)
Fabio Calamia (master research project, 2022)
Xinrui Li (master-thesis research project, 2022)
Miranda Ramzy (master-thesis research project, 2021)
Yun Ding (visiting postdoc, 2021)
Florian Ragalmuto (master research project, 2021)
Tess Röder (master research project, 2021)
Johanna Röscher (bachelor-thesis research project, 2021)
COMPLETED PHDs
Jasper Hajonides – graduated 2021 at the University of Oxford (supervised together with Kia Nobre & Mark Stokes)
Sage Boettcher – graduated 2020 at the University of Oxford (supervised together with Kia Nobre & Mark Stokes)
Simone Heideman – graduated 2018 at the University of Oxford (supervised together with Kia Nobre)