Sophie van der Sluis

CV and research focus

After a PhD on the role of working memory deficiencies in children with reading and/or arithmetic disabilities, I worked for 8 months as a post doc at the Psychological Methods department of the University of Amsterdam, where I was engaged in research on measurement invariance and the study of group differences in cognitive ability.

Since 2005, I have worked in the field of Behavior Genetics. Together with Dr Danielle Posthuma, I studied gene-environment interaction models at the department of Biological Psychology of the VU University Amsterdam. Since 2009, I work at the departments of Clinical Genetics and Functional Genomics at the VU Medical Center Amsterdam.

Since I received a VENI-grant in 2009, my research specifically focuses on psychometric issues in the context of behavioral genetics research: how are heritability estimates, and genetic association or linkage signals, affected by psychometric issues concerning the measurement of the phenotypes involved (multidimensionality, resolution of the phenotypic instruments, the use of sum-scores versus item scores, etc). Within this field, I closely collaborate with Dr Conor Dolan (University of Amsterdam), and Dr Danielle Posthuma and Prof Matthijs Verhage (VU University Amsterdam).

Besides these psychometric studies, I’m involved in mouse behavioral studies. Together with various other researchers at the lab (Prof Matthijs Verhage, Prof Guus Smit, Maarten Loos, Emmeke Aarts, Gregoire Maroteaux, and Bastijn Koopmans) we study behavioral differences between genetically different mouse strains, such as measured using an automated home-cage testing device. Together with PhD student Emmek Aarts, I’m specifically interested in ways to model these longitudinally collected behavioral data within and across genetically distinct strains.

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Publications

See all publications of Sophie van der Sluis in PubMed