Nicole is a research associate who completed her PhD in Child Development at the University of Amsterdam. Her main research interest is in understanding how parenting shapes children’s long-term mental health. She is currently working on identifying common elements of parenting interventions and will work together with parents to co-develop guidelines that support mental health in the early years as part of the Golden Threads project.
In previous work, Nicole showed that parenting and parenting interventions not only influence children’s behaviour, but also their biological age and ‘epigenome’ (responsible for regulating gene expression). Alongside this work, Nicole implemented and delivered the Family Check-Up parenting program in Amsterdam.