Sien Verelst
PhD Student
Research:
I graduated as a clinical psychologist. My PhD focusses on the transmission of resilience within families with children in middle childhood (10-12 years old). Resilience is the ability to positively adapt to adversity and stress. It’s a protector against disease and psychological problems. We believe resilience generally originates at home. Daily family life requires constant adjusting, and we want to know how children and parents help each other during difficult times. The study I work on is part of the TRIAD Project, a big project dedicated to uncovering family resilience and all of its aspects. We will investigate the biobehavioral dynamics between family members and see how resilience is related to various factors (e.g. attachment, biomarkers, epigenetics, physiology…). I focus mainly on discovering the influence of certain biomarkers on resilience; like BDNF, oxytocin, cortisol, DHEA, testosterone and progesterone. The aim of the project is to provide more insight into the development of resilience in order to develop interventions to make children more resilient more quickly in the future.