Workshop 1: Your Future Career: Getting to know yourself to design a career that fits you

Completing a PhD opens many career paths, in and beyond academia. But how do you decide what fits you?

This interactive workshop starts not with available jobs, but with you: who you are, what matters to you, your strengths, and the working life you want to create. Through reflective and interactive exercises, you will gain insight into the work contexts and directions that align with your values and qualities.

In the final part, we turn these insights into action by exploring possible career directions, small experiments, and concrete next steps. You will not leave with a fixed ten-year plan, but with a clearer personal compass and practical ideas for moving towards a working life that fits.

About the organizer:

Maartje Luijten is a NIP-registered psychologist, certified coach, and Associate Professor of Wellbeing at Radboud University. She founded Academic Companion to help academics create more space, clarity, and ownership in their work and lives.

Drawing on nearly twenty years in academia, Maartje understands both its rewards—curiosity, intellectual freedom, meaningful research—and its pressures. Her work centres on a key question: how can academics not only perform well, but also build a working life that fits who they are?

Workshop 2: Creating Effective Data Visualization in R

Clear and well-designed visualizations are essential for communicating research findings effectively. In this interactive workshop, participants will learn how to create informative, accurate, and publication-ready data visualizations in R.

The first part of the workshop introduces key principles of effective data visualization. We will discuss how to select an appropriate type of figure, present patterns and relationships clearly, and avoid common design choices that may obscure or misrepresent results.

In the second part, participants will apply these principles in a hands-on session focused on creating and customizing visualizations in R. No prior experience with R is required. Ready-to-use code will be provided, and participants will be guided through each step.

About the organizers:

This workshop is organized by Lisette Sibbald and Bram Meijer.

Lisette Sibbald is a PhD candidate in the Department of Methodology and Statistics and at Tranzo, the Scientific Center for Care and Wellbeing, at Tilburg University. Her research combines psychology and data science and focuses on predicting postpartum depression to support earlier identification and prevention. She uses modern quantitative methods, including machine learning and network analysis. More information about her research and publications is available through her ORCID profile: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-5030-0108

My name is Bram Meijer and I am a PhD candidate at the Donders Institute, Radboudumc in Nijmegen. In my research, I investigate how night-time caregiving in early childhood impacts the well-being of parents and their newborn. While we know that caregiving patterns and potentially accompanying behavioral changes, such as sleep disruptions, after childbirth are associated with postpartum depression, stress, and anxiety, little is known about how these disruptions occur on a continuous basis. In our study (Nightly Dance), we will collect longitudinal data with smartwatches and crying sensors to fill this critical gap. Using machine learning and statistical causality techniques, we aim to identify associations between caregiving patterns on a minute-to-minute basis in the first six months, long-term parental outcomes and infant development. Our results can serve as a basis for future evidence-based intervention and training programs for parents experiencing more severe challenges.

Workshop3: Research with children and youth through co-creation

This workshop explores co-creation as an approach to conduct meaningful research with children and youth. We will focus on how researchers can design and conduct studies with young people rather than about them. The session evolves around inclusive methodologies, examines child-centered research designs, and pays particular attention to working with marginalized communities. This interactive workshop will be dialogue-oriented, leaving room to share experiences and to further elaborate on the paper writing process with diverse sets of data.

About the organizer:

Dr. Julia Steenwegen is a Senior Researcher at CED-Groep and a Postdoctoral Researcher at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her work focuses on inclusive and participatory research with children and young people, particularly in marginalised communities. She explores how children can act as co-researchers to strengthen resilience and shape more equitable, sustainable neighbourhoods.