Guusje Collin | RESEARCH FELLOW
Guusje Collin studies the neurobiology of emerging mental illness. As a psychiatrist, the main drive and focus of her research are to understand what happens in the brain when psychiatric disorders first manifest and to use these insights to develop novel interventions that aim to slow or prevent mental illness development.
After obtaining her MD at the Utrecht University in 2010, she started a combined PhD and Residency Program at the University Medical Center Utrecht, Department of Psychiatry. In her PhD, she focused on brain network organization and the impact of familial risk on connectome development in major mental illness. Her dissertation was awarded the Kleyn & Magnus Thesis prize for the best PhD-thesis in Clinical Neuroscience at the UMC Utrecht Brain Center (2016). Following the completion of her PhD, she remained at the UMC Utrecht as a post-doc and psychiatry resident (2015 – 2017) and completed a clinical fellowship in cognitive and behavioral neurology at the VUmc Alzheimer Center. In 2017, she moved to Boston for a post-doc at Harvard University’s BIDMC and Psychiatry Neuroimaging Laboratory (BWH) and MIT’s McGovern Institute of Brain Research, funded by a Marie Curie Global Fellowship (2017 – 2019). In 2019, she returned to the UMC Utrecht for the incoming phase of her Marie Curie Fellowship and to complete her residency in psychiatry (2020). In 2021, Guusje was awarded a Research Fellowship GGZ from ZonMw (NWO) and a Brain and Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF) Young Investigator grant. She moved to Nijmegen to work as a psychiatrist and researcher at the Radboudumc and Donders Institute. In collaboration with Anne Speckens and Roshan Cools, she is working on a Randomized Clinical Trial testing the effects of mindfulness-based early intervention on internalizing problems, self-referential processing, and (meta-)cognitive control in youth.