Research

Hello! I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in the School of Humanities and Digital Sciences at Tilburg University. Using my background in machine learning and especially reinforcement learning, I am researching how we can support people in reaching their long-term goals. Specifically, I am interested in adapting digital behavior change support to people and their situations over time. I am especially fascinated by integrating knowledge from Social Sciences, particularly Psychology, into AI approaches to directly benefit people and their health.

While I focused on creating adaptive support for a conversational agent that helps people quit smoking and become more physically active during my PhD as part of the Perfect Fit project, the emphasis of my current Postdoc research is on preventing relapse in mentally ill people. This research is part of an NWO-funded KIC project.

Academic background

I defended my PhD thesis Psychology-Informed Reinforcement Learning for Situated Virtual Coaching in Smoking Cessation, supervised by Prof. dr. ir. Willem-Paul Brinkman and Prof. dr. Mark Neerincx at TU Delft, in 2025. Prior to my PhD, I graduated summa cum laude with a BSc. in Computer Science from Fordham University, USA (2018) and obtained my MSc. in Computer Science from TU Delft with distinction (2020). My four years in the US were fully funded by a swimming scholarship.