Gjalt-Jorn (GJ) is a health psychologist with broad research interests, such as nightlife-related health behaviors (his PhD. thesis was about ecstasy use and harm reduction strategies), threatening communications (a post-doc project covered the effectiveness and use of threatening communication by health promotion professionals), statistics and methodology (which he teaches at the Dutch Open University), and how health psychologists conduct their research (which is why he co-founded HPB). In addition to his empirical and theoretical research, he likes writing functions to make advanced analyses more accessible to a broad audience (see the package 'userfriendlyscience' for the free statistical R software), and thinking about how to make research more open, transparent, and accountable.
Martin Hagger is Professor of Health Psychology, Psychological Sciences, University of California, Merced, USA and Finland Distinguished Professor (FiDiPro), Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. His research interests lie in the fields of health psychology and behavioral medicine with a particular interest in the social psychological influences on health behavior. Specifically, his research applies social psychological and motivational theories to predict, explain, and change the preventive behaviors (e.g., physical activity, healthy eating, alcohol reduction, smoking cessation, medication adherence) associated with reduced risk from chronic health conditions. He is involved in both basic and applied forms of research. His basic, formative research adopts mixed methods to develop theory and understand the social psychological processes that underpin the self-regulation of behavior. His applied research involves the translation of basic research into practice and using social psychological theory to inform interventions to promote health behavior.
Ad A. Kaptein (1949), professor of Medical Psychology, Leiden University Medical Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands.
Teaches Medical Psychology and Medical Humanities to medical students.
Research on how patients make sense of illness. Special interest in how patients draw their illness and their medical management. Current research focusses on Literature & Medicine: representations of illness in novels, poems, films, music, paintings.
Editor of some 10 books in the health psychology domain. Editorial responsibilities for many journals; Editor-in-Chief of Psychology & Health 1992 - 2002. President EHPS 2000-2002.
Rachel is a Research Associate in the Health Psychology Research Group at University College London (UCL) and an Associate Consultant for UCL’s Centre for Behaviour Change. Her PhD, completed at the National University of Ireland, Galway, examined the impact of threat-based persuasive communications on driver behaviour. Rachel has research experience across a range of theoretical and applied projects in social, health and cognitive psychology - with particular emphasis on behaviour change in the context of safe and sustainable transport. She is currently lead researcher on the UK Medical Research Council-funded Theories and Techniques of Behaviour Change project, which aims to identify hypothesised links between behaviour change techniques (BCTs) and their underlying theoretical mechanisms of action.
Anne is a Research Fellow at the department of Health Sciences at the University of York, UK. She obtained her PhD in Health Psychology at Maastricht University, the Netherlands, and was previously a Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her thesis studied the psychology of blood donation, with a focus on maintenance of behaviour. Subsequently, she worked as a postdoc at Sanquin Research in Amsterdam, followed by a postdoc at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, where she studied the affective determinants of health and pro-social behaviour, using emotion regulation techniques to change behaviour.
Anne’s research interests include the determinants of health behaviour, the organisation, delivery, and evaluation of complex health interventions, long-term maintenance of health behaviour change, emotion regulation interventions, and equality in healthcare.
A health psychologist by training, I earned my PhD in 2012 from the Freie Universität Berlin (Germany). After two post-doc fellowships at the Centre for Hip Health & Mobility, University of British Columbia (Canada), and the Social- and Organisational Psychology department at the Freie Universität Berlin, I am currently a visiting professor at the Health Psychology Unit of the Freie Universität Berlin.
With my research I aim to better understand patterns of health and risk behaviours, and its relationship to individual, psychological and environmental factors across various adult populations, including adults at work, older adults in retirement and those in acute care or rehabilitation (e.g., after a fracture). In collaboration with individual and community stakeholders, I develop and test interdisciplinary, theory-based interventions aimed to minimize sedentary time, improve and maintain multiple health behaviors, and promote well-being.
My knowledge dissemination efforts do not only target traditional scientific avenues but also include but also include consulting activities (i.e. trainings in occupational health promotion).
As the spokesperson of the German association of early career researchers in Health Psychology (German Psychology Society) I am continuously contributing to the networking and professional training of other young researchers.
I am a clinical health psychologist with interests in tinnitus, internet and mobile interventions, CBT, exposure therapy, research ethics and single case experimental design methodology.
I completed a PhD in the social psychology of communication in 2004, and since 2006 have been working in health psychology and healthcare communication, based in a School of Pharmacy until 2018. I now work alongside a team of physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech language therapists and dieticians.
Nelli Hankonen is an assistant professor in social psychology at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She is interested in using behavioural science theory and evidence in designing multicomponent, real-world interventions to change behaviours, in order to promote wellbeing and health. Her current research fellowship with the Academy of Finland is focused on mixed-methods process evaluations of behaviour change interventions, examining the underlying mechanisms of behaviour change.
Nathalie Michels is a young postdoctoral researcher at the department of Public Health at Gent University. With her background in biomedical medicine (option nutrition), she is interested in the link between psychosocial and physiological factors. Within the unit Nutrition, she has implemented her PhD in 2009-2013 on the longitudinal stress-obesity relation in children and underlying nutritional and physiological pathways. As a result, she has expertise in questionnaires, anthropometry and biomarkers (e.g. salivary cortisol and heart rate variability). During her postdoc, she will continue exploring this stress-obesity relation by studying the role of chronic inflammation, tryptophan and gut microbiota. Apart from this, she is involved in other national and European projects on hydration, nutrition, obesity, cardiovascular health, inflammation, hormonal factors, well-being, depression, emotion regulation, physical fitness, sleep,... She has more than 20 first-author A1 publications and over 30 coauthorships, is co-promotor of 4 ongoing PhD projects; received 2 best-PhD awards and several other grants/awards; has reviewed 33 manuscripts and has given >20 oral congress presentations.
I am a Doctoral Fellow at the Institute of Health and Society. After completing my Research Master in Clinical and Health Psychology at Leiden University (Netherlands) in 2013, I moved to Newcastle where I was awarded a Health Foundation Improvement Science Fellowship. My PhD focuses on applying theories from health psychology and behavioural medicine to develop and evaluate interventions that support healthcare professionals with changing their behaviour. I am particularly interested in whether simple behaviour change strategies (e.g. implementation intentions) are effective in assisting healthcare professionals with creating and breaking habits.
I have expertise in qualitative and quantitative research methods, and conducting narrative and systematic reviews, including meta-analyses.
During my PhD I have been involved in the development, implementation and evaluation of a national quality improvement intervention: the ‘Diabetes UK Information Prescription’.
Gerjo Kok is a social psychologist with a PhD in experimental social psychology from the University of Groningen. He is emeritus professor of applied psychology at Maastricht University, former dean of the School of Psychology & Neuroscience, former professor of health education & promotion, and former endowed professor of HIV prevention and health promotion; all at Maastricht University. His research and publications focus on applying psychological theories to behavior change to reduce societal problems, and on planning models for behavior change interventions for health promotion and disease prevention, energy conservation, traffic safety, and discrimination. He is one of the authors of the Intervention Mapping protocol (ISBN-13: 978-1119035497), stressing the importance of the optimal application of evidence and theories in health psychological research, intervention development, and implementation.
