Professor Eveline Crone is full professor of developmental neuroscience in society at Erasmus University Rotterdam and professor of neurocognitive developmental psychology at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her Society, Youth and Neuroscience Connected (SYNC) lab examines the psychological and neural processes involved in self-regulation and social development from birth to adulthood, with a special focus on adolescence. Professor Crone will be the Keynote speaker at the 2025 ECNP Congress in Amsterdam. Recently she spoke to Tom Parkhill, ECNP Press Officer, about her life and work.

 

Eveline Crone: I'm a professor at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, and also at Leiden University. I made the switch from Leiden University to Rotterdam five years ago in 2020. My research is about the developing brain with a specific focus on childhood and adolescence, but my interests go all the way from birth till old age. But there is so much that happens in that phase of childhood and adolescence, and that caught my attention early on, as a super interesting transition phase in our lives. That’s my area of research.

 

It happened quite quickly. I was especially interested in developmental psychology, so I was interested in the lifespan changes. I was lucky enough to start working on adolescents at the moment that there was something of a major discovery in science showing that brain development continues much longer than people initially thought. This was in 1998 and 1999 (the last century!) when I went as an intern at the University of Pittsburgh. I was 21 years old at that time and it was the moment when people were first starting to do functional brain imaging in children, and I just happened to be there. Sometimes it’s serendipity.

 

In the years that followed there were so many discoveries. At that time brain development was thought to occur mainly from birth or even from conception to approximately the ages of eight or nine years of age. People had thought after that time, brain development was basically complete. When I was there as a student, there were these discoveries that in terms of neural changes in grey matter and white matter so many more transitions happening. And in the last 15 to 20 years, we discovered these changes go all the way until about age 25 or so. Of course, your brain changes your whole life, so it’s not that your brain stays fixed. But there’s a bit of a growth spurt that happens at adolescence, so that's why I got interested in the field. Sometimes you get interested because there's a major discovery, and then you kind of get into that flow.

 

Generally, this is a very positive period in life: the transition from the family structure to finding your own place in society and learning to expand your scope and meeting more people. Your social circles move from being centred only on family, then family and friends, and then family, friends and society. And that's super interesting too. That’s finding yourself.

 

Well, when I was in Pittsburgh I was very young, still only 21. I was there for one year, and then I did my PhD in Amsterdam for four years, and then I went back to the United States, to the University of California at Davis. This was the moment when functional brain imaging was really starting to arise as an important method, and I wanted to learn that from the experts – in the Netherlands it was still in an early phase. So that’s why I did a two-year postdoc in the United States. And I loved, loved, loved it, so it was difficult to go back, but that’s also because I was a postdoc at that time, and I think the postdoc period is just the best time in a scientist’s life because you don't have to prove anything anymore. You have your PhD, you’re part of the group, you're part of the team. And at the same time, you don't have all the obligations yet of starting a lab and having a big teaching load. So for many reasons – not just being in the United States – my postdoc was just a great time for me. But in the end I'm European, and I also really like it here.

 

Yes, it’s difficult to take in the changes which are now happening in the US. We are seeing significant political changes, and worrying budget cuts. Just last week I attended a meeting where speakers from the US finished their talks by defending the NIH against the proposed budget cuts.
Yes, if you would have told me that six months ago, I would never have believed it. But I'm so grateful to everything I learned in the United States. So for me, it's really hard to take, I'm really quite upset about it.

 

And then I moved to a position at Leiden University as an assistant professor, then as an associate and then full professor. That all went relatively fast, partly because it was area of research where so much was happening. So we were making discovery after discovery, which really helps to advance your career! So, in a relatively short time I was able to build a big lab. In Leiden I did a lot of work on setting up longitudinal brain imaging studies. In developmental psychology, where I was originally trained, all the standards say that you follow the same individuals over time, but this was not yet much done in brain research. This was kind of the big step that I took in Leiden; I set up these carefully designed longitudinal studies, to really study within-person changes over time. Then in 2020 I moved to Rotterdam. This was really because I felt that we were a little bit too much focused on the individual, and too focused on cognitive processes that we already understand quite well, such as response inhibition and self-regulation in a fixed context, and I started to feel that I was not asking the really important questions: how do you navigate a complex society? How do you deal with climate change and social inequality? How do you deal with performance pressure? All these big forces influence young people, and in my view they were not incorporated enough in our studies. So I really took kind of like a risky step to go to a completely different university with a different style – more impact driven, which is kind of a buzzword in my field – which can make people get a little bit uneasy, because one wants to do science for the sake of science. I also want to do science for science: I was vice president of the European Research Council, the ERC, for seven years, and that's the flagship funding scheme for excellent, curiosity-driven science. But for me, those were not contradictions. I just felt that I had to ask different types of questions to be a good scientist. So that's why I made the move. It was during the pandemic, so there were many reasons why it was bit risky and bit challenging also – but in a positive way. Now I feel it’s starting to pay off, now I start to see that research is getting better because I was able to ask different questions.

 

I wouldn't say that I only do imaging. In terms of my neuroscience background, yes, that's basically structural and functional neuroimaging. But I was trained as a psychologist, and I trained myself over the years in fields like sociology or design thinking. I work a lot with people in industrial engineering, so I wouldn't see myself only as a neuroimaging scientist. But I guess the ECNP Congress would mostly locate me in that field.

 

I think at the moment the group only use it for animal research, so the work is still in the early stages. Given that I study kids from age seven onwards, I’m always a little bit behind on those technological developments because you don't take any risks with young children. But I follow it and that’s the nice thing of having a big lab: I can hire people who were trained in those fields and they can make our research much better. So my lab is super interdisciplinary and also very diverse in terms of the people who work there, I mean culturally, ethnically, etc. There was a bit of frustration at one point, I had the feeling that I was only including participants in my study that were related to other scientists, or who got interested because their parents are interested in science. I was so comfortable in Leiden, it was almost impossible to change. But still, I felt I had to make the step. Rotterdam is a harbour city, the biggest harbour in Europe. There’s lots of diversity in people's socioeconomic background, with over 150 different nationalities, diversity and culture, is really celebrated here. So it was a big move for me in many different ways, but it worked out.

 

This was basically question driven. Now I’m focusing a lot on the period starting from puberty – when the hormones associated with puberty start to kind of emerge – and these Influence certain brain regions that are important for processing emotions and you see also more fluctuations in mood, but also activity and functional connectivity between subcortical regions and prefrontal cortex. It's a kind of biological point starting point in development, and that's also when you start to broaden your social scope. Initially in my studies, 18 to 20 year olds were adults, when I started to do this research 20 years ago, and that that was my reference group. And now I realised “Oh, that that's a mistake” because 18 to 20 years is in the midst of that adolescent development.

 

The GUTS project is a 10-year programme where scientists from seven Dutch universities join forces to make the next step in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. This means that the questions that we ask are brought to the table by not only researchers, but also youth organisations and teachers. We hope to align our research programme to the important challenges that young people deal with these days. And indeed, social media and smartphone use are also high on our agenda. But the programme started only two years ago so we don’t have the answers yet.

 

I would include more youth voices. We have to keep thinking about whether our research aligns with the way young people experience the world.

 

I hope they will be inspired to think out of the box and embrace both the detailed experimental, but also the larger societal questions, even if this can lead to more uncertainty. I have always argued against the division of fundamental science and impact-driven research. Both can happen at the same time, and when combined in innovative ways, even make our questions and designs richer and stronger. 

 

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