Karin has published in a wide variety of high impact journals in the areas of behavioral genetics and genetic epidemiology. Her work spans a number of areas including addiction, sexual behavior, relationship partner preferences and choices, intelligence, musical ability, psychiatric disorders, and self harm. This breadth of work reflects, in part, her curiosity and willingness to follow interesting questions wherever they take her. She has mastered a range of relevant theoretical perspectives across multiple disciplines, all while maintaining her focus on the role of genetics.
In terms of the methodological approaches she employs, Karin has consistently capitalised on the field’s rapid advances in techniques and data, identifying the opportunities they provide to answer new questions. This has meant analyses using a variety of methods, including twin-family studies, candidate gene (non)replications, genomewide association studies, GREML (GCTA) analysis, polygenic prediction, and runs of homozygosity (testing inbreeding effects).
Karin’s work has earned a number of awards, prizes and grants including best early career presentation at the World Congress on Psychiatric Genetics in 2016, and a NARSAD Young Investigator Grant in 2015 (through 2017). She has started a new position at the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam in January 2018, which will place her in an even better position for raising awareness of behavioral genetic research to the public.
Karin did her PhD at the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute and the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the VU University (Amsterdam, the Netherlands), the University of Queensland (Brisbane, Australia), the Karolinska Institutet (Stockholm, the Netherlands), and the Radboud University (Nijmegen, the Netherlands).
