NEWS

2024

9/2024: Thibault Merkelijn joined the group as a research assistant to support Marloes Henckens and the PhDs in their research. Welcome back to him!
9/2024: Research interns Nika Englebert, Sjoerd Jacobs, Anna Alikhanbeigi, Emmanuela Pirani, Samantha Dillisse join the group to support Melissa Veendijk, Sabrina van Heukelum, Ana Carolina Temporao, Angelos Didachos respectively in their research! Warm welcome to our interns!
3/2024: PhD student Bart Dirven's research article on Hippocampal Trauma Memory Processing Conveying Susceptibility to Traumatic Stress has been accepted for publication in Neurosci. Congratulations to Bart! His finding implicates variation in epigenetic regulation within the hippocampus, as well as reduced regional hippocampal activity during remote fear memory recall in interindividual differences in susceptibility to traumatic stress. Read more here
2024: Group leader Marloes Henckens received the Donders Research Stimulation Fund! This funding will help to further encourage collaboration, to facilitate new partnerships and projects within Donders research community. Congratulations!
2024: Marloes Henckens was invited as symposium speaker at the GSN/SFB 1280/BIOME Conference on Extinction Learning at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
2024: Marloes Henckens was invited as speaker at the EBBS/EBPS mini conference at the FENS Forum, Vienna, Austria

2023

9/2023: Melissa Veendijk joined the group as a research assistant to support Marloes Henckens and the PhDs in their research. Warm welcome to her!
2023: Postdoc Sabrina van Heukelum received the Open competition domain science XS grant with a project focusing on "Unravelling the molecular pathways of aberrant trauma memory". With this grant, she aims to make use of a state-of-the-art technology, spatial transcriptomics, to close the knowledge gap by revealing the full gene expression of trauma memory cells and thereby molecular pathways involved in PTSD.
5/2023: Marloes Henckens was invited as a symposium speaker at the NeuroFrance in Lyon to talk about Inter-individual differences in trauma processing and how those predict vulnerability vs resilience.
4/2023: Marloes Henckens was invited as a symposium speaker at the International Conference on Learning & Memory in Huntington Beach, CA to talk about the fact that only stress-susceptible mice show aberrant fear memory engrams.
4/2023: A manuscript titled "A consensus protocol for functional connectivity analysis in the rat brain" was published in Nature neuroscience and written in collaboration with Donders researchers and group leader Marloes Henckens. Special thanks to all the co-authors for their contributions! The protocol and processing pipeline described in this paper is openly shared with the neuroimaging community to promote interoperability and cooperation toward tackling the most important challenges in neuroscience. Read more here
2023: Marloes Henckens receives the incentive grant from the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science (OCW). The incentive grants aim to serve as working capital for Assistant Professors (UD), Associate Professors (UHD), or Professors with a permanent contract. These grants are intended to provide opportunities and incentives for long-term planning, creating structural space for research within faculties and institutes. The grants support activities such as developing new ideas, forming consortia, and establishing innovative research lines, ultimately enhancing the research capabilities and impact of academic staff. Congratulations!
1/2023: PhD student Bart Dirven presented his thesis "The Neurobiological Signature of Susceptibility to Traumatic Stress" on his PhD defense. Our warmest congratulations to Maxime! His thesis is available: Manuscript%20Bart%20Dirven%2011-11-2022%20(1)%201.pdf

2022

12/2022: PhD student Bart Dirven's research article on Aberrant ventral dentate gyrus structure and function in trauma susceptible mice has been accepted for publication in Translational psychiatry. Congratulations to Bart! His finding report on specific structural and functional changes in the ventral DG in trauma susceptible male mice. Find it here
11/2022: PhD student Bart Dirven's research article on the Longitudinal assessment of amygdala activity in mice susceptible to trauma has been accepted for publication in Psychoneuroendocrinology. Congratulations to Bart! His research is able to demonstrate that deviant BLA activity during fear learning predicts susceptibility to its long-term consequences and that aberrant subsequent BLA responses to stressful contexts depend on the exact context. Read more here
10/2022: PhD student Maxime Houtekamer presented her thesis "Remember to forget what you fear" on his PhD defense. Our warmest congratulations to Maxime! Check out her thesis! : 20220128_Remember%20to%20forget%20what%20you%20fear_Houtekamer%201.pdf

9/2022: Marloes Henckens was invited as a symposium speaker at International Symposium on Resilience Research in Mainz to talk about Stress and memory: from synapse to ensembles and behavior
8/2022: PhD student Kari Bosch's research article titled "Repeated testing modulates chronic unpredictable mild stress effects in male rats" has been accepted for publication in Behavior brain research! Congratulations to Kari! Her findings suggest that distinct CUMS-induced components of depressive-like behavior are affected differentially by recovery time and repeated testing. Find her article here
6/2022: Marloes Henckens was invited as a symposium speaker at the European congress of psychiatry in Budapest to talk about Neural Network Responses to Traumatic Stress Predicting its Longterm Consequences (online)
5/2022: Marloes Henckens was invited as a symposium speaker at Mediterranean Neuroscience Society in Dubrovnik to talk about Neural activity and network connectivity associated with inter-individual differences in trauma susceptibility

2021

10/2021: PhD student Maxime Houtekamer's research article titled "A reminder before extinction failed to prevent the return of conditioned threat responses irrespective of threat memory intensity in rats" has been accepted in Behavioral Neuroscience journal. Congratulations to Maxime! Her results showed no evidence that threat memory intensity is a potential modulator of the effectiveness of the reminder-extinction procedure. Read more here
6/2021: PhD student Qi Song presented his thesis on his PhD defense. Our warmest congratulations to Qi! His thesis can be found here thesis%20Qi%20Song%20(1)%201.pdf
4/2021: PhD student Maxime Houtekamer's research article on the efficacy of a reminder before extinction in preventing the return of conditioned fear has been accepted for publication in Behavioral Neuroscience. Congratulations to Maxime! Her data importantly contribute to the growing body of non-replications in the field of memory reconsolidation and indicate the clear boundary conditions for successful interruption of reconsolidation processing being effective in permanently reducing fear memory.
3/2021: PhD student Qi Song's thesis entitled 'Noradrenergic effects on the neural mechanisms underlying memory detailedness' has been accepted by his manuscript committee. Our warmest congratulations to Qi! His defense date is set on June 7th, 12:30h. We keep you posted!
2021: Marloes Henckens receives the Vidi grant from the NWO talent program! Vidi is for researchers who have carried out several years of postdoctoral research after their PhD and allows them to develop their own innovative research line and appoint one or more researchers to this end. With this grant, Marloes will investigate the role of an aberrant trauma memory in the development of symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by investigating its neural representation and underlying neurobiological mechanisms.
2021: Postdoc Kübra Gülmez Karaca received the Open competition domain science XS grant to develop her research!
2021: Postdoc Kübra Gülmez Karaca received the prestigious Veni grant for a project titled "Relapse into anxiety: Measuring fear memories in the brain". Our congratulations to her! Veni is part of the NWO Talent Programme. It allows researchers who have recently obtained their PhD to conduct independent research and develop their ideas for a period of three years

2020

10/2020: PhD student Bart Dirven published his first research article describing the role of aberrant function and structure of the ventral dentate gyrus in PTSD-vulnerability as a preprint in BioRxiv. You can read it here .
09/2020: A joint opinion article of many Dutch researchers (co-authored by Marloes Henckens) on how the COVID-19 pandemic highlights the necessity of animal research was published in Current Biology.
09/2020: PhD student Maxime Houtekamer's research article on the efficacy of the memory-extinction procedure to disrupt contextual threat memories in humans using virtual reality got accepted in Scientific Reports. Excellent work Maxime!
07/2020: Our review article describing the effects of stress hormones on memory accuracy got published in the special issue on the Neuronal mechanisms of stress resilience in Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience! Special credits to PhD student Sevgi Bahtiyar as first author. You can read it here .
07/2020: PhD student Graeme Preston published a research article showing that mitochondrial dysfunction and concomitant fatty acid oxidation defects are sufficient to discriminate PTSD-vulnerable from resilient mice in Brain, Behavior & Immunity - Health. You can read his findings here .
03/2020: PhD student Qi Song's first research article got accepted for publication in the journal Stress. Congratulations Qi! You can read his work on the noradrenergic enhancement of object memory in mice here .

2019

28-11-2019: PhD student Chunan Guo presented her work at the Zoology 2019 & NVG Conference on the topic 'Learning and Memory in the Animal Kingdom - from nematodes to humans' in Groningen. Her talk was entitled 'Stress hormone effects on the accuracy of episodic-like memory and its neural correlates'. Find the full program here .
28/11/2018: Marloes Henckens' paper ' The association between serotonin transporter availability and the neural correlates of fear bradycardia ' is published in PNAS. Special thanks to all the co-authors for their contributions! The findings of this translational paper on how reduced expression of the serotonin transporter can contributed to exaggerated fear responding in both humans and rats, were covered in a news item (in Dutch), and Marloes was interviewed on BNR news radio (in Dutch) on the implications of the findings.
11/2019: The book ' Stress Resilience: Molecular and Behavioral Aspects ' edited by Prof. Alon Chen is published by Elsevier! Marloes Henckens, together with co-authors Alon Chen and Jan Deussing, contributed the book chapter 'The role of the CRF-urocortin system in stress resilience' to this interesting read on the neurobiology underlying stress resilience.
11/2019: Interns Liz Waajen and Mark Schaap join the group as research interns to support Marloes Henckens and Dewi van der Geugten in their research.
10/2019: PhD students Bart Dirven and Chunan Guo attended the Society for Neuroscience ( SfN ) Meeting in Chicago, USA. They both presented a poster on their work; ' The memory engram for trauma and its implications for vulnerability to PTSD ' (Bart), and ' Stress hormone effects on memory accuracy in an object-in-context task in mice ' (Chunan).
10/2019: Erasmus exchange student Teya Daneva joins the group as research intern to support Bart Dirven in his research into the epigenetic mechanisms contributing to PTSD vulnerability.
10/2019: Hariharan Mahadevan joins the group as a guest researcher. He completed his master's in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Radboud University, and wants to use this opportunity to obtain extra experience in animal research. He will be working on the analyzes of mice brains using iDISCO+ and the image processing of the light-sheet microscope data.
08/2019: Postdoc Kubra Gulmez Karaca starts her project on 'Stress effects on memory accuracy vs generalization: Testing a new model based on influencing the temporal dynamics of memory consolidation', in a collaborative project with Prof. Benno Roozendaal.
09/2019: Research intern Andriana Botan joins the group to support Bart Dirven in his research into the potential neural predictors of PTSD susceptibility.
22/09/2019: Marloes Henckens chaired and lectured in the symposium 'Modulation of memory accuracy and generalization by stress', at the European Brain and Behavior Society (EBBS) Meeting in Prague, Czech Republic. The session was co-chaired by Prof. Israel Liberzon, and co-speakers were Prof. Benno Roozendaal, Dr. Aline Desmedt, and Dr. Christian Merz.
02/09/2019: Marloes Henckens receives the Radboudumc Junior Researcher Round grant together with Dr. Johannes Graeff (Lausanne, Switzerland). The grant allows them to hire a joint PhD student on the project 'Neuro-epigenetic mechanisms of aberrant memory processing in PTSD - Towards a new road of intervention', which will be executed in a collaborative effort between their research groups.
26-06-2019: Marloes Henckens gave an invited lecture at the symposium 'In search for the neural substrates underlying post-traumatic stress disorder symptomatology and vulnerability' hosted by Dr. Muriel Koehl (Bordeaux, France) of the Mediterranean Society for Neuroscience (MSN) Meeting in Marrakesh, Morocco. Her talk was entitled 'The neural signature of trauma susceptibility'. Co-speakers were Dr. Muriel Koehl and Dr. Aline Desmedt. See here the full programme.
21-06-2019: PhD student Dewi van der Geugten chaired the symposium 'The extended amygdala; on the interface of anxiety and (generalized) fear' at the Dutch Neuroscience Meeting 2019 in Lunteren. This translational symposium covered both human and animal studies, hosting Prof. Alexander Shackman, Dr. Maren Lange, Dr. Laura Luyten and Dr. Floris Klumpers. Marloes Henckens was spoke on the role of the extended amygdala in susceptibility to PTSD. Read the full program here .
14-06-2019: Marloes Henckens lectures as keynote speaker at the 'Mind the Brain' symposium in Utrecht, with this year's topic: 'The Stressed Brain: A Nervous System'. Read more about the symposium, organized by students from the Neuroscience and Cognition master's program of Utrecht University, here .
04/2019: Marloes Henckens' paper ' How serotonin transporter gene variance affects defensive behaviors along the threat imminence continuum ' is published in Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. Thanks to co-authors Dr. Marijn Kroes and Dr. Judith Homberg for their efforts!
21/02/2019: PhD student Graeme Preston successfully defended his thesis during his dissertation, entitled 'Traumatic Stress-Induced Mitochondrial Dysfunction Drives Vulnerability to PTSD-Like Symptomatology and Multi-System Metabolic Reprogramming in Mice'. Congratulations to Graeme on this major achievement!
01/2019: PhD student Floriana Mogavero joins the research group. She is co-supervised by Dr. Jeffrey Glennon and Prof. Jan Buitelaar on a project investigating the association between dysregulation of the circadian rhythm and abnormal aggressive and anxiety-like behavior in mice.

2018

05-11-2018: Sanne Merjenburgh joins the group as a research intern to support Marloes Henckens in her research.
11-10-2018: Marloes Henckens receives the Open Research Area grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the German Research Foundation (DFG) together with Prof. Benno Roozendaal and Dr. Erno Hermans at the Donders Institute and Prof. Oliver Wolf at the Ruhr University Bochum. In a 1 million euro translational research project this team of researchers aims to investigate how stress hormones alter the course and quality of long-term memories. Please read more on the project here .
11-10-2018: PhD student Bart Dirven gave a presentation at the Donders Discussions in a symposium that discusses the wide range of approaches used to study stress and stress-related disorders. Please read the abstract of his talk here .
September 2018: Research interns Rebecca van Rijn and Riv Maas join the group to support Marloes Henckens and Bart Dirven in their research.
24-09-2018: Marloes Henckens gave an invited lecture at the Neurocentre Magendie, INSERM in Bordeaux, on special invitation of Dr. Aline Desmedt.
01-09-2018: Kari Bosch starts as a PhD student in the laboratory of Dr. Judith Homberg. Marloes Henckens will be co-supervising her in her 4-year project investigating whether antidepressant efficacy can be enhanced by exposure to a positive environment, and which neural correlates mediate these effects.
01-09-2018: Dewi van der Geugten officially joins the group as a PhD student! For the next 4 years, she will investigate the extended amygdala circuitry and its role in fear generalization and anxiety.
23-08-2018: Marloes Henckens gave an invited lecture in the symposium 'Dopamine, stress and their interplay in brain development', at the Sociedade Brasileira de Neurociências e Comportamento - SBNeC Meeting 2018 , in Santos Brazil. Co-speakers were her host Dr. Bruno Rezende de Souza and Gregg Standwood.
07-11/07/2018: Research assistant Dewi van der Geugten and Marloes Henckens attended the FENS Forum 2018 in Berlin. Dewi presented her poster ' TRAPPING TRAUMATIC MEMORIES; Trauma encoding- and retrieval-induced neural activity reflecting susceptibility to posttraumatic stress disorder ', which was well received.
July 2018: Marloes Henckens received a FENS-IBRO Travel grant to attend the FENS Forum 2018 in Berlin and was selected for the Young Investigator Training Program ( YITP ) to spend 2 weeks in the lab of Dr. Ferah Yildirim, expert in the field of neuroepigenetics.
07/06/2018: PhD student Bart Dirven presents his work at the Dutch Neuroscience Meeting 2018 in Lunteren. His talk ' The memory engram for trauma and its implications for vulnerability to PTSD ' is part of the symposium ' Stress modulation of memory accuracy vs generalization ' hosted by Marloes Henckens and Dr. Tom Smeets. Read more details here.
25/04/2018: Research assistant Dewi van der Geugten received the prestigious Radboudumc Toptalent grant! In the fall of 2018, she will start her PhD project in our lab focusing on the neural correlates of fear (over)generalization. She aims to dissect the amygdala circuits that are recruited in case of generalized (compared to specific) fear, to ultimately intervene in these to keep the fear response specific and reduced overall anxiety. The project will be a collaboration with the lab of Prof. Hans van Bokhoven (Dep. Human Genetics) at the Radboud University Medical Center.
11/04/2018: Marloes Henckens lectures at the annual conference for the Dutch Society for Psychiatry (NVvP) in Maastricht on how she uses animal models to study stress-related psychopathology. The lecture is part of the symposium 'Stress-related translational psychiatry: from mouse to healthy subject and patient', which perfectly fits the topic of this year's meeting; Translational challenges in psychiatry. Read more on the conference.
05/04/2018: Marloes Henckens participates in the annual Brain Awareness Week, giving lectures at the Stedelijk Gymnasium Arnhem on how stress influences brain function. Read more about the Brain Awareness Week here .
01/01/2018: Marloes Henckens is officially appointed 'junior principal investigator' (equivalent of assistant professor) at the Radboud university medical center.

2017

22/12/2017: Marloes Henckens' manuscript 'CRF receptor type 2 neurons in the posterior bed nucleus of the stria terminalis critically contribute to stress recovery' is published in Molecular Psychiatry ( abstract ).
21/12/2017: Research intern Dewi van der Geugten wins the Poster Prize at the annual poster session of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior. Read about it here .
09/12/2017: Pieter Schipper's manuscript 'Acute inescapable stress alleviates fear extinction recall deficits caused by serotonin transporter abolishment' is published in Behavioral Brain Research ( abstract ).
15/11/2017: Sevgi Bahtiyar - recipient of the prestigious Donders Toptalent PhD grant - joins our research group and starts a joint research project with the lab of Prof. Benno Roozendaal investigating the effects of glucocorticoids on memory accuracy and systems consolidation processes in the brain.
10/11/2017: Marloes Henckens participates in InScience, a Dutch International Film Festival for scientific movies, organized by the LUX and Radboud University/Radboudumc, Nijmegen. She is invited to discuss the science behind emotions to kindergarten classes, following the broadcast of the Disney movie 'Inside Out'. Find more information on this broadcast and the program of InScience here .
19/10/2017: Marloes Henckens and Erno Hermans host the Donders Session 'Forever lost in translation?', dealing to explore the usability of animal models in studying the mechanistic underpinnings of human psychopathologies characterized by higher-order cognitive dysfunction. Please find further details here .
20/10/2017: Pieter Schipper successfully defends his PhD thesis entitled: 'Smart coping: serotonin transporter gene variation and environment interact in determining the behavioral adaptation to stress ( abstract ). A mini symposium is organized just prior to the defense hosting the corona members. Please find the full program and details here .
15/10/2017: PhD student Maxime Houtekamer extends our research team with a joint project with Dr. Marijn Kroes and Dr. Judith Homberg, working on the neural signature of emotional memory reconsolidation across different memory systems.
26/09/2017: Marloes Henckens is guest speaker at the Science Café Eindhoven (in Boekhandel van Piere), in a session on 'Stress', organized by Studium Generale of the Technical University Eindhoven (TU/e). Read more here .
19-20/08/2017: Marloes Henckens joins a team of Radboud university medical center researchers to the Lowlands Musical Festival in Biddinghuizen, the Netherlands, to conduct an experiment into stage fright among the visitors. Read more here (in Dutch).
30/05/2017: Pieter Schipper's manuscript 'Prior fear conditioning does not impede enhanced active avoidance in serotonin transporter knockout rats' has been published in Behavioral Brain Research ( abstract ).
19/04/2017: Miranda van Bodegom's first manuscript 'Modulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis by early life stress exposure' is published in a special issue on stress in Frontiers of Cellular Neuroscience ( abstract ).
11/04/2017: Bart Dirven's first manuscript 'Epigenetic programming of the neuroendocrine stress response by adult life stress' is published online in the Journal of Molecular Endocrinology ( abstract ).
11/04/2017: Marloes Henckens gives a lecture at the biannual meeting of the British Neuroscience Association, in Birmingham, UK, in the symposium 'Imaging the emotional brain: fMRI studies in rodents and man' ( abstract ).
20/02/2017: Marloes Henckens participates in a debate on "Vette Stress" during a 'knowledge café' session organized by the KNAW, NEMO Science Museum, de Volkskrant and Café De Balie, Amsterdam. Read more here .
14-15/03/2017: Marloes Henckens participates in the annual Brain Awareness Week, giving lectures at the Stedelijk Gymnasium Nijmegen on how stress influences brain function. Read more about the Brain Awareness Week here