PhD student HSRI: Evi van den Elzen

Can you tell us something about you?

My name is Evi van den Elzen, I was born and raised in the beautiful city of Den Bosch and now live in Utrecht, which is almost just as lovely but misses out on “carnaval”.

I did both my bachelor’s and master’s at Tilburg University, where I first did my bachelor in Psychology and Health (2014-2017) and then the Research Master in Individual Differences and Assessment (IDA, 2017-2019).

My PhD studies concern Personalized Cognitive Diagnostics for Early Detection of Dementia, and I am to develop a sensitive cognitive test/test battery that can screen for risk of developing dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease. The project I work on is a collaboration between four departments, being Cognitive Neuropsychology, Developmental Psychology, Methodology and Statistics, and Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence (TSHD).

Did cross-departmental research play a role during your bachelor’s/master’s studies? To which extent?

Especially during my master’s studies, cross-departmental or interdisciplinary research became important. During this master’s program we had courses given by professors from all sorts of departments within TSB and learned to look at different topics from different points of view. We also got the opportunity to do different internal and international traineeships at different departments, and I even got to write my master’s thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, where interdisciplinary research is also central. Altogether a good preparation for a cross-departmental PhD project, if I may say so myself.

What excited you about this multidisciplinary project you applied for?

Like you mention, I was instantly appealed by the fact that multiple departments are involved in this project. My interests have always been broad, but what I enjoyed a lot was to apply advanced statistics to societally relevant topics – and this is exactly what happens in this project. With different promoters involved from different departments, there also is a lot of expertise present within the team. It is of great value to me that I can integrate parts of all different fields into one project with great societal relevance.

This also brings me to what I made me most excited: The relevance of the project is so clear. For me, this was most important in a PhD topic, as I want to be able to implement what I am doing into practice and not just have it lay around in academia. I feel like this is something, besides the interdisciplinary aspect, that all HSRI PhD projects have in common: Although they concern completely different topics, they are all very societally relevant. This makes it additionally interesting to connect with the other PhD students!

Why is cross-departmental research important for your PhD project? What does it add to the project?

My project concerns the development of a cognitive test or test battery that is sensitive to the earliest stages of dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease. Ideally, such test could then be implemented as a screening tool for older people, used by GP’s and memory clinics. Because there are such large individual differences in the disease and it is preceded by a long preclinical phase with very subtle symptoms, an important aspect of such test is that it can be personalized and it can keep track of a person’s progress over time – so that we can look at within-person change.

To illustrate what the cross-departmental setup of this project adds to it… On the one hand, my supervisors from the departments Cognitive Neuropsychology and Developmental Psychology have a lot of experience with doing research with older people and have a lot of knowledge about memory. Without this expertise, it would be impossible to build a test that is suitable for these older persons, with the right test material and the right wording. Then on the other hand, my supervisors from the departments Methodology and Statistics and Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence are very experienced with programming and building complicated statistical models. Without their expertise, we could not make the test personalized and make sure that a person will be shown the right test material based on, for example, demographics or previous answers.

What do you like about cross-departmental research?

Like mentioned, I am very excited about combining knowledge from the different domains into one coherent project, where every domain is just as important. For example in my project, where we focus on the development of a test specifically for Dutch older adults, the value of the psychologists also becomes very clear. I think that everyone involved in the project has their own value, and working together as a transparent, strong team makes what I think is a great PhD project.