Lukas van Herk is a PhD student at the Brain Research and Innovation Centre. In 2018 he was awarded with a master’s degree in Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience, with a specialization in Fundamental Neuroscience, at Maastricht University. During his master internship he researched the effects of early life stress and a lifelong deficiency of serotonin on both emotion regulation as well as morphology of several limbic brain areas.

After a short break in the food service industry, Lukas has started a PhD project in collaboration with UMC Utrecht, under supervision of Dr. Elbert Geuze, Dr. Antoin de Weijer and Dr. Bastiaan Bruinsma, in January 2022, investigating moral decision making and exposure to stress in the healthy military population. How does military personnel make moral decisions during missions in which they are exposed to high levels of stress? Is there a possibility to pharmaceutically mediate moral decision making during stress? These questions will be stipulated and answered during this project.

Cognitive neuroscience, biological psychiatry, stress, stress-related disorders, behaviour, morality, decision-making.