Dr. Wouter Cox
Assistant Professor
The aim of my research is to translate fundamental insights on fear memories and emotional episodic memories to new treatments for anxiety disorders and PTSD. To this end, I take an interdisciplinary approach and employ different - yet complementary - research paradigms at several levels of analysis (from neural activity to behavioral responses). I received my PhD at the University of Amsterdam in 2022 (Memory Transience versus Memory Persistence). In this work, for which I was supported by an NWO Research Talent grant, I aimed to elucidate how time, context, and memory reactivation modulate changes of emotional memory. In my postdoctoral work, which is still ongoing and receives support from an ABC project grant, I test the effects of exercise and neurogenesis on fear generalization. This project involves a collaboration between the Department of Clinical Psychology, and the Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences, both at the University of Amsterdam, to connect neuroscience with psychological science. Overall, my research is rooted in my belief that combinations of fundamental science and clinical science offer great opportunities, particularly to improve mental healthcare.