You will be part of the 2018 VICI grant program 'How gut bacteria and stress shape child development'.
You will join the very dynamic and highly collaborative Developmental Psychobiology Lab (
DPBlab), a multidisciplinary group of senior and junior researchers. You will help design, preregister, and carry out the RCT study, collecting behavioral, psychological, and biological data. Data collection will be in childcare centers and possibly also in the lab or home environments. You will analyse the data and report the results in scientific journals and conferences, and in a doctoral dissertation.
We are looking for a highly capable, eager, and intrinsically motivated PhD candidate. The project is embedded in the Developmental Psychobiology Lab (DPBLab; PI: Prof.dr. Carolina de Weerth) at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour in Nijmegen (the Netherlands). This position is part of a program started with a personal VICI grant awarded to de Weerth by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). The grant is on healthy children's gut microbial colonization in relation to stress early in life and later brain functioning, behavior, and cognition.
The aim of this PhD project is to test whether a naturalistic stress-reducing intervention program based on caregiver-infant physical contact can positively affect infant gut microbial colonization and development. In an RCT, caregiver-infant physical contact in 3-month-old infants transitioning into center-based childcare will be increased in the intervention group.
The idea behind this study is that by means of physical contact and one-to-one attention, young infants' stress levels upon entry to childcare and maternal separation will be reduced. The study will start to uncover causal relations between the infant's stress status and the quality of the early microbial colonization. Additionally, it will potentially provide a simple, yet efficient, stress-reducing intervention that may also have positive effects on infant physical and psychological health.