I am a postdoctoral researcher at Psychological Methods Unit of the University of Amsterdam, working on a Talent Grant obtained from the Amsterdam Brain and Cognition research platform. My research focuses on the intersection between high-level cognition (e.g., religious beliefs, morality), low-level mechanisms (cognitive or neural processing) and methodological advancements. My work typically involves answering substantive questions in the field of social and cognitive psychology using innovative tools such as Bayesian hierarchical modeling, a many-analysts approach, analysis blinding, or multiverse analysis. Examples of such substantive questions are: do religious symbols make people seem more trustworthy? Does nonsense from a scientist sound better than nonsense from a spiritual guru? Do anger displays promote status in men while harming status in women?

Bayesian Inference

Across all my research, I apply Bayesian statistics. Specifically, I have used Bayesian hierarchical modeling, a flexible and powerful method to maximize the informativeness of the data yet constrain inference based on structural features (e.g., people nested in countries, trials nested in people), as well as theoretical predictions (e.g., all countries should show an effect in the same direction).

In my current post-doc position, I will further develop these Bayesian hierarchical models for joint modeling of behavioral (e.g., accuracy, response times) and neural data (e.g., fMRI, EEG). In this project, we aim to provide (1) guidelines for the necessary number of trials and subjects in cognitive tasks given the signal-to-noise ratio and (2) a collection of openly accessible joint modeling pipelines combining behavioral and neural data to optimize this signal-to-noise ratio.

Open Science

A large part of my PhD focused on promoting open science practices within the field of the psychology of religion. Furthermore, together with Alexandra Sarafoglou, I founded the Open Science Community Amsterdam (OSCA). As OSCA, we organize lectures, journal club meetings, and workshops and provide guidance for researchers interested in applying open science practices in their own work. In my own work, I always try to provide open data & code and publish preprints of my manuscripts.