Kenneth van der Zee gained his research master’s degree in Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience at the University of Maastricht, following his bachelor’s degree in Psychology at the same university. He had been interested in brain stimulation from his bachelor onwards. Writing about Transcranial Ultrasound Neuromodulation for his Bachelor’s thesis and doing his research internship in the Brain Stimulation and Cognition group with Dr. Teresa Schuhmann. During this internship he gathered and analysed behavioural and EEG data from a clinical study. In this study, visuospatial hemineglect patients were treated with dual-site tACS to rebalance the attention networks to reduce neglect symptoms post-stroke. After this, he joined Lennart Verhagen’s Cognitive Neuromodulation lab at Radboud University as a research assistant to help develop the acoustic simulation package, help and train others to run said simulations and to gather data for ongoing projects in the lab.
Over the course of his PhD, Kenneth will investigate how approach and avoidance behaviour is influenced by neural activity and how this behaviour is tweaked according to a dynamically changing environment. Specifically, He will use transcranial ultrasound neuromodulation to stimulate nodes of this network such as the amygdala in combination with BOLD imaging and behavioural paradigms to map both the neural and behavioural changes as an effect of neuromodulation. He works with both the Experimental Psychopathology & Affective Neuroscience and Cognitive Neuromodulation labs and is supervised by Karin Roelofs, Ivan Toni and Lennart Verhagen.