On 17 March the Donders Poster Session took place at the Maria Montessori building. This Donders Institute Event was the first major event after the pandemic period and more than 200 people attended the event! Our PhD-students Yvonne Willemsen and Henrik Eckermann presented their posters at the event. Henrik presented a completed project on the…

Two out of three mothers experience the return to work after maternity leave as negative. The transition from maternity leave to work seems to be hard for them, resulting in stress related complaints and dropout as a result. What do we actually know about this phase? What can professionals do to help parents in the…

We have great news: Our new study, the REWIND Studie, has been completed! In this project, our research team developed a new questionnaire to measure emotions and thoughts mothers might have when returning to work after maternity leave, and aims to better understand how mothers in the Netherlands deal with this important transition. Over a…

BABY & CHILD RESEARCH CENTERSUMMER SCHOOL 2022: TRANSLATING DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE FROM RESEARCH TO PRACTICE The Baby & Child Research Center Nijmegen is offering a one-week summer course as part of the Radboud Summer School. The course “Translating developmental science from research to practice” will take place from July 11 to 15.  The course is aimed at students, researchers and professionals with…

We are very happy to announce that we obtained a grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development (ZonMw) for our project: “The Perinatal Mental Health Professional: Prevention at the Right Place and the Right Time”! More than 1 in 5 women have maternal mental health (MMH) problems in the perinatal period. These…

Dr. Stefania Vacaru has been awarded the Academy Van der Gaag Grant to conduct a research project at the Social Environment & Stress Lab, UC Davis in 2022, in collaboration with Prof. Camelia Hostinar. In this 3-months project, Stefania will gather new understanding concerning childhood psychoneuroendocrine processes (i.e. HPA axis regulation and its end-product cortisol),…

On February 21, Carolina de Weerth was invited to the University of Turku Finland as an opponent at the defense of PhD student Susanna Kortesluoma. Susanna defended a dissertation in Pharmacology, Drug Development and Therapeutics entitled ”The Role of Maternal Prenatal Distress in the Development and Functioning of the Infant Cortisol Stress Response”. The 2-hour…

For the past two years we have been very busy with our data collection for the SMILEY project, in which we study perinatal factors of children’s development. This project consist of multiple online questionnaires, but also two visits to the lab: one during pregnancy and one postnatal visit when the babies are around 7 weeks…

It has long been known that skin-to-skin contact with your baby facilitates bonding, regulates the baby’s body temperature, and brings more peace and less stress for mother and child. Our PhD student Kelly Cooijmans has now shown in her research that daily skin-to-skin contact can also increase breastfeeding duration during the first year of life….

Yangwenshan Ou, a PhD candidate in our lab group and Microbiology group at Wageningen University and Research, has been focused on the association of behavioral problems with the gut microbial composition in children. Multiple psychiatric disorders, such as major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and autism spectrum disorder, have been observed with perturbations in the gut…