Marieke van der Schaaf PhD

Bio

With a background in both clinical neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience I aim to build bridges between cognitive neurosciences, medical sciences and clinical practice. I strive to increase our mechanistic understanding of neural mechanisms underlying motivational deficits and fatigue in medical diseases to ultimately improve its pharmacological and behavioural treatment. More specifically, I aim to identify the dissociable effects of biological and psychological factors on mental well-being. To this end I study the role of immune-brain interactions in the emergence and maintenance of motivational symptoms after disease. For this I combine immune and pharmacological manipulations with neuroimaging,  immune (blood sampling), behavioural (e.g. effort based decision making), and questionnaire outcomes  in both healthy populations and (longitudinal) patient studies.

Expertise

Sickness behaviour, Motivation, Fatigue, Cancer-related fatigue

Cost-benefit decision making, valence-based learning, reversal learning, cognitive flexibility

Neuroimaging (task-fMRI, sMRI, MRS)

Courses

• Master's Internship CNP External
• Brain Dysfunction