Arkin Data Science

Arkin is a treatment institute for mental health care and includes various treatment centers. Together they cover the treatment of many mental health problems, from depression and anxiety, eating disorders, addiction, personality disorders, and forensic care. The data science group started to explore the value of all recorded data, and aims to support the treatment process.

Research

My research had concentrated on brain imaging network analysis of social anxiety, personality, and personality disorders. A list of my publications can be found here. I have spent my time on run-of-the-mill underpowered fMRI studies, many bridges to nowhere, and some attempts to figure something out:

Reductionism and the predictability of mental health

The results of a survey, asking researchers to assess how well mental health problems can be predicted based on biological data, now and in the future.

Representational Similarity Regression

Attempting to bridge the differences in similarity space (!) of individuals based on behavioral (left) and brain (right) data.

Borderline Personality Disorder Classification

...based on brain network analyses. It worked so so. Here we aimed to visualize the weights of a SVM classifier sorted by relative importance.

The power problem of fMRI

Statistically underpowered fMRI studies are essentially uninformative even when all other experimental considerations have been addressed impeccably.

The generalization of physical to social stress

We developed an fMRI paradigm to mimic animal behavioral control studies. The paradigm was feasible and somewhat promising, but the fMRI results of two separate studies were underwhelming. This could still be a power issue, but it might have also been too complex of a process to nail down to a simple experiment.

Anticipating a public speech in Social Anxiety

... and 'decoding' brain network connectivity images based on meta-analytic data

Teaching

Obvious to most, but I feel very underappreciated in the research world: teaching takes up most of your assistant (and beyond) professor time unless you have major research grants. More importantly, it is probably more consequential than any research paper. Below is a list of the tasks and courses I am involved in.

Teaching Coordination at Clinical Psychology

Together with my collegue Marieke Effting I organize the teaching of the clinical Pscyhcology department.

Mood and Axiety Disorders

As part of this undergraduate course, I cover the evolution, genetics and neurobiology of mental health

Evidence Based Clinical Practice

Here we cover the basics of assessing the effectiveness of mental health treatment: the basics of the glm, meta-analyses and n=1 research.

Personality Disorders

Research master's course of the clinical and biological background of Personality Diosrders

Biological Psychiatry: Hope and Hype

My teaching baby: a research master's course on the insights and quackery of Biological Psychiatry.