PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Freek van Ede
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, while also holding a position as Fellow at Worcester College Oxford. In 2020, Freek received an ERC Starting Grant (European Research Council) to found the Proactive Brain Lab at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and in 2022 he received an NWO Vidi grant (Dutch Research Council) to expand the lab. In 2025, Freek received an ATRAE grant (Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities) to reposition and expand the lab at the University of Barcelona.
For his scientific contributions at the intersections of the human mind, brain, and behaviour, Freek received various awards and recognitions, including 4 Young Investigator Awards – from the international Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS, 2023), the US-based Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in association with the Vision Science Society (FABBS/VSS, 2025), the British Association for Cognitive Neuroscience (BACN, 2023) and the Dutch Society for Brain and Cognition (NVP, 2022). Freek further received a Mid-Career Award for Fundamental Research from the Ammodo foundation (2025), a Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science (APS, 2021), and a Best-Publication Award from the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCoP, 2020). In 2024, Freek was featured ‘Scientist to Watch’ on the SN10 list from Science News Magazine.
Freek currently serves as associate editor at The Journal of Neuroscience, is on the editorial boards of Vision and the Journal of Eye Movement Research, and on the advisory boards of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience and Visual Cognition. At the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Freek teaches the research-master course on Cognitive Electrophysiology (EEG), and served in the board of the Institute for Brain and Behaviour Amsterdam, as department PhD-candidate advisor, and as coordinator of the shared lab facilities.
POST-DOCS
Baiwei Liu
Baiwei obtained his master degree in Cognitive Neuropsychology from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2020 and finished his PhD studies in the Proactive Brain Lab in March 2025 (pending formal evaluation and a public defense). 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.
PHD CANDIDATES
Anna van Harmelen
Anna obtained her bachelor's degree in Psychobiology at the University of Amsterdam in 2021, after which she pursued a master's degree in Neuroscience at the Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences at the LMU in Munich. In the Proactive Brain Lab, Anna currently investigates the various factors that govern attentional selection and prioritisation within visual working memory, using a combination of eye-tracking and behavioural experiments.
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 ASSISTANTS
Karishma Kalesh Kallingapuram
Karishma obtained her bachelor’s degree in Psychology at the University of Delhi in 2023, following which she pursued a Research Masters in Cognitive Neuropsychology at VU Amsterdam. In the Proactive Brain Lab, Karishma uses EEG and eye-tracking to investigate the mechanisms underlying the dynamic nature of working memory and how they serve flexible behaviour.
Merel van Steenis
Merel obtained her bachelor’s degree in Cognition, Language, and Communication at the University of Amsterdam and is now pursuing a research master’s in Cognitive Neuropsychology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterda . At the Proactive Brain Lab, she uses eye tracking and EEG to investigate attentional selection in visual and auditory working memory.
MASTER AND BACHELOR STUDENTS
(We are generally open to hosting research projects)
LAB ALUMNI (since 2020)
Core lab members
Zach Nudelman (Research Assistant, 2025-2026)
Sisi Wang (Postdoc, 2023-2025)
Laurie Rol (Research Assistant, 2024-2025)
Ezra Nasrawi (PhD, 2020-2025)
Eelke de Vries (PhD, 2022-2025)
Daniela Gresch (PhD, 2021-2024)
Abel Puigseslloses (Research Assistant, 2023-2024)
Sofia Alexopoulou (Research Assistant, 2022-2023)
Visiting PhDs and Postdocs
Isabel Courage (Visiting PhD, 2026) [from Zurich]
Larissa Behnke (Visiting PhD, 2026) [from Zurich]
Marc Sabio Albert (Visiting PhD, 2025) [from Barcelona]
Águeda Fuentes-Guerra Toral (Visiting PhD, 2025) [from Granada]
Yun Ding (visiting Postdoc, 2021) [from Wisconsin]
Bachelor and Master students
Karishma Kalesh Kallingapuram (master-thesis research project, 2026)
Merel van Steenis (master research project, 2026)
Bernadett Bakos (bachelor-thesis research project, 2026)
Lissy Hoppe (bachelor-thesis research project, 2026)
Fathima Shamsuddin (master-thesis research project, 2024/25)
Laurie Rol (master research project, 2025)
Christos Dalamarinis (master research project, 2025)
Emma van den Brink (master research project, 2025)
Roos Kalensee (master research project, 2025)
Nara Alshawareb (master research project, 2025)
Aikaterini Moysiadou (master research project, 2025)
Narges Naghibi (master research project, 2025)
Bita Tehranfar (master research project, 2025)
Isabelle Christophersen (bachelor-thesis research project, 2025)
Caterina Fregonese (master-thesis research project, 2023/24)
Siyang Kong (master-thesis research project, 2024)
Valentina Abondano (master research project, 2024)
Kaiyu Huang (master-thesis research project, 2024)
Thomas Janzen (master research project, 2024)
Eva Ruzicka (master research project, 2024)
Holly Zhang (master research project, 2024)
Frantz Aimé (master research project, 2024)
Carolin Schneider (bachelor-thesis research project, 2024)
Beatriz Figueiredo Janicas (master-thesis research project, 2023)
Eleni Evangelidi (master-thesis research project, 2023)
Betül Karabaş (master-thesis research project, 2023)
Anna van Harmelen (master-thesis research project, 2023)
Abel Puigseslloses (master research project, 2023)
Joelle Simon (master research project, 2023)
Kesia Martina (bachelor-thesis research project, 2023)
Mare Hamelink (bachelor-thesis research project, 2023)
Flavia Ercoli (bachelor-thesis research project, 2023)
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)
Florian Ragalmuto (master research project, 2021)
Tess Röder (master research project, 2021)
Johanna Röscher (bachelor-thesis research project, 2021)
COMPLETED PhDs
Baiwei Liu – graduated 2025 at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Ezra Nasrawi – graduated 2025 at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Eelke de Vries – graduated in 2025 at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Daniela Gresch – graduated 2024 at the University of Oxford (supervised together with Kia Nobre & Sage Boettcher)
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)