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) working 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 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. 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), the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS, 2023), and the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (FABBS/VSS, 2025). In 2024 he was featured on the SN10 ‘Scientists to Watch’ list from Science News Magazine and in 2025 he received the Ammodo Science Award for Fundamental Research. Freek currently serves as associate editor at The Journal of Neuroscience, is on the editorial board of Vision, and on the editorial advisory boards of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Progress in Neurobiology, and Visual Cognition. At the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, he is board member of the Institute for Brain and Behaviour Amsterdam, serves as department PhD-candidate advisor, and teaches the research-master course on Cognitive Electrophysiology.
POST-DOCS

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.

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 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.

Ezra Nasrawi
Ezra obtained a master degree in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the University of Amsterdam in 2020. In the Proactive Brain Lab, Ezra investigates the action-oriented nature of visual working memory, and its neural signatures, mainly using electroencephalography (EEG).
RESEARCH ASSISTANT

Zach Nudelman
Zach completed his master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at the VU in 2021. In the Proactive Brain Lab, Zach will focus on using virtual reality and eye-tracking to explore the principles of visual working memory and selective attention in more realistic experimental environments.
VISITING RESEARCHERS

Águeda Fuentes-Guerra Toral
Águeda is a PhD candidate at the University of Granada (Spain) who is visiting the Proactive Brain Lab to work on an EEG project on involuntary influences over the selection of visual-motor representations in working memory.

Marc Sabio Albert
Marc is a PhD candidate at the University of Barcelona (Spain) who is currently visiting the Proactive Brain Lab to initiate a new project combining EEG and eye tracking. His research focuses on how we process simultaneous multisensory predictions, and how they are modulated by top-down processes.
MASTER AND BACHELOR STUDENTS
Current
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)
(We are generally open to hosting additional research projects)
LAB ALUMNI (since 2020)
Core lab members
Eelke de Vries (PhD, 2022-2025)
Daniela Gresch (PhD, 2021-2024)
Abel Puigseslloses (Research Assistant, 2023-2024)
Sofia Alexopoulou (Research Assistant, 2022-2023)
Yun Ding (visiting postdoc, 2021)
Bachelor and Master students
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
Eelke de Vries – graduated 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)