New HSO member: Dani van der Kamp

Hello everyone, my name is Dani van der Kamp and I will be working as a research assistant for the next five months together with Annemarie Wagemakers and Roald Pijpker on the project about socio-economic differences in resilience related to COVID-19 and the measures.

A little bit more about me. I started my academic career in Wageningen, with the bachelor’s Health and Society. After three great years in Wageningen, I decided it was time to broaden my horizon and leave Gelderland (where I also grew up) for the most southern province of the Netherlands, Limburg. I started with a master’s degree in Health and Social Psychology at Maastricht University because individual human (health-related) behavior fascinated me so much that I had to learn more about it. In my free time, I watched videos about how to build habits, how to override your automatic system, and much more. In the master’s I learned the scientific theories behind some of these ideas, which also helped me a lot to optimize my personal life, to ‘manipulate’ myself into making the healthy choices, so to speak. Moreover, when I was writing my master's thesis, I noticed that I really enjoyed doing research, but at the same time I didn't feel ready to apply for PhD programmes because I wanted to gain more experience. Therefore, I started a second master’s in Health Education and Promotion, which I recently finished. The programme was a great contribution, because it focused more on the population level and gave me the opportunity to write another master’s thesis. At the same time, I worked with a researcher from Maastricht University on the development of a measurement instrument for interpretation bias (in relation to chronic pain) and we are still finalizing the scientific article.

In my spare time, I love to do sports, cook, meet with friends, and try out new things. I also enjoy learning and reading about self-development and mental health. One of my friends once said to me: "You are the kind of person who reads self-help books and applies what you learn to your life".  As you can tell, mental health is my main area of interest. Therefore, I am really looking forward to working on this resilience project and hopefully, after these five months, I will find a way to continue to (scientifically) dedicate myself to a mentally healthier world.