Dr. Petra van Alphen

Petra van Alphen has been a researcher with the Science System Assessment division since September 2009.

Academic background and career
Petra studied Phonetics at Utrecht University before going on to spend several years as a researcher with the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Her projects there entailed researching the cognitive processes involved in understanding the spoken word. She gained her doctorate from Radboud University Nijmegen in 2004, having spent a year as a junior researcher on a Utrecht University project examining dyslexia and Specific Language Impairment (SLI). She then took up a post as post-doctoral researcher in behavioural science at the University of Amsterdam. In 2005, she was awarded a Veni grant to conduct EEG-based research into the dynamics of how we interpret spoken language. At the same time, she lectured at the Cognitive Science Centre in Amsterdam. In 2008, she returned to Nijmegen to complete her Veni project and was involved in various EEG studies in the field of language psychology. Petra van Alphen joined the Rathenau Institute in September 2009.