Ilya Veer

In the GUTS consortium, Ilya contributes expertise on mental resilience to the longitudinal studies in WP1. As the co-promoter of Myrthe Vel Tromp, he is involved in a sub-study within WP1 focusing on the role of reward in academic resilience. Using functional MRI, he examines brain areas sensitive to anticipating and responding to a reward or punishment in the form of an extra point or a point deducted for a hypothetical grade. He expects that stronger activation in these brain areas could influence the relationship between school stressors on one hand, and mental health and academic performance on the other hand.

After his PhD at Leiden University (2015) on the neural signs of (recovery from) stress, Ilya worked at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin as a senior staff scientist in the department of psychiatry, studying resilience, “imaging genetics”, and fMRI analysis methods. Since 2021, Ilya is working as an assistant professor in the department of developmental psychology at the University of Amsterdam, where he continues to research factors and mechanisms that enable a more resilient outcome across the different phases of life.