Iris Engelhard

Iris Engelhard is Full Professor in Clinical Psychology at Utrecht University since 2008 and director of the Experimental Psychopathology lab Utrecht. She is also affiliated with Altrecht, one of the largest mental health organizations in the Netherlands. She is involved in linking science to mental health care and conducts research in Altrecht Academic Anxiety Center, which has a Top Clinical Mental Health Care ('TOPGGz') quality mark. She is a registered Cognitive Behavioral Therapist (Cognitive Gedragstherapeut VGCt®) and a licensed Health Care psychologist.

Prof. Engelhard received her PhD in 2002 at Maastricht University and was a Fulbright scholar at Harvard University. She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) and a member of the Dutch-Flemish research program Experimental Psychopathology. She was Associate Editor of Cognition and Emotion (2007-2014), and is on the editorial board of several international scientific journals (Behaviour Research and Therapy; Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry; European Journal of Psychotraumatology).

For over 10 years, she has been leading an innovative research program that tackles academic and clinical questions on the topics of posttraumatic stress disorder and anxiety disorders. Her research has made a unique contribution to the understanding of the etiology and treatment of these disorders, using novel, rigorous experimental and prospective methods, and a translational approach where basic cognitive science is in the service of applied research that seeks to improve mental health.

She has received prestigious prizes for her research, including the bi-annual Catharina Pijls Prize for her dissertation, and personal grants, including all three innovational grants (VENI, VIDI, and VICI) from the Talent program of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), and a TOP grant from the Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development (ZONMW). She is one of the researchers taking part in the NWO Gravitation grant application ‘New Science of Mental Disorders’. She has over 200 scientific publications. She teaches in the Clinical Psychology and Research Master SHP programs at Utrecht University and in the postdoctoral Health Psychology program at RINO Zuid.