Anneke Vuuregge

I am a PhD student with a background in neurobiology, focusing on psychopharmacology and pathophysiology. I have developed a broad interest in mental health looking at molecular as well as behavioural level in preclinical and clinical phases. My PhD project “Working out urban stress” is a multidisciplinary project under the supervision of Anouk Schrantee, Joram Mul, Claudi Bockting and Paul Lucassen.

During this PhD, I will investigate the role of physical activity in anxiety and depressive disorders and looking at how and when physical activity can promote resilience to stress. In my first project, StayFine, I will look at the role of physical activity in relapse prevention in adolescents remitted from anxiety and/or depressive disorders. We will use network analyses, an innovative statistical analysis, to look at the relations on symptom level. Furthermore, this project involves another clinical and several preclinical experiments to further investigate PA effects on brain connectivity using fMRI and the timing-related effects of PA on stress-related behaviour, respectively.