Veni awarded to Stefanie Nelemans

Stefanie Nelemans was awarded a Dutch Research Council (NWO) Veni grant for her project Why is everybody watching me?! Working towards a novel model to explain social anxiety in adolescence

NWO selects researchers based on the quality of the researcher, the innovative nature of the research, the expected scientific impact of the research proposal and possibilities for knowledge utilization. With this Veni Stefanie can carry out her own research for a period of three years. She will study social anxiety symptom development and persistence in adolescence.

“I am really excited to be able to pursue my own research line on the etiology and maintenance of adolescent internalizing symptoms within a biopsychosocial framework”

Social anxiety symptoms strongly hamper adolescent development. But what characteristics make some adolescents more vulnerable to develop social anxiety symptoms than others? And what underlying mechanisms can explain why social anxiety symptoms are so persistent over time? Stefanie will address these questions by focusing on a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors on both the long-term (across several years) and the short-term (from moment-to-moment and day-to-day). Novel empirical insights that result from this project will be integrated into an innovative theoretical model.

Stefanie is assistant professor at the Department of Youth and Family, Utrecht University. Her research focuses on the development of anxiety and depressive symptoms in adolescents from the normal population and the associations with biological, psychological, and social factors. Stefanie has a long standing involvement with CID. Originally by working as a postdoc on a CID project, currently by supervising CID PhD students and as a guest editor on our CID special issue.

More information on the 2019 Veni awardees on the NWO website.
Read about all 24 Veni awardees at Utrecht University here