Unna Danner studied Social Psychology at the Free University of Amsterdam and at the University of Kent at Canterbury. She received her PhD in 2007 and the title of her thesis was “By force of habit: On the formation and maintenance of goal-directed habitual behavior”. She was supervised by prof. Henk Aarts and prof. Nanne de Vries.
She did a postdoc at Altrecht Eating Disorders Rintveld in collaboration with the Department of Health Psychology of Utrecht University. In 2010 she became a fulltime senior researcher at Rintveld. Her research focuses on cognitive functioning of people with eating disorders and the influence of emotional problems such as maladaptive emotion regulation and depressive symptoms. Because of her interest in more general inefficiencies in cognitive and emotional functioning and these are suggested to be transdiagnostic characteristics, she now focuses more on the comparison of these problems in people with other disorders.
As part of her work at Rintveld she manages and coordinates all scientific projects at Rintveld and she is member of the multidisciplinary research group URGE (Utrecht Research Group Eating disorders). She is an active member of the Academy for Eating Disorders (AED) that organizes the annual international eating disorders conference. In addition, she is a member of the Committee Scientific Research and the Advisory board Scientic Research of Altrecht.
Since 2016 she holds a teaching position at the department of Clinical Psychology at Utrecht University for two days a week. She supervises master and bachelor theses, and clinical internships. Furthermore she is involved in the courses Academic Professional, Methods and Statistics 3, and Foundations of Clinical Psychology.