Bio Esther van Duin

Hi there!

My name is Esther van Duin, I’m from the Netherlands and in the NeuroScience track. I’m living in Amsterdam now for almost 4 years, but I’m raised in Amersfoort.
What human beings are and how we function has always interested me. Since high school, when I found out I had dyslexia, I wanted to know what was going on inside my own head (and what was going wrong, why I was reading slower than anybody else).
Furthermore, both my parents were working in a mental hospital, so I grew up hearing a lot about psychiatric patients and there syndromes.

After graduation I was really in doubt whether to go to the theatre / drama school (another passion) or not, but I was too scared to do the audition, so I decided to go to the University of Amsterdam to study psychobiology.
During my bachelor I was mainly interested in schizophrenia, drugs, stress, meditation, developmental disorders and I wrote my bachelor thesis (a research proposal) about “the neurobiology underlying dyslexia”
Besides my study activities I was also in the board of the study association of psychobiology, was student assistant for the education institute of psychobiology and head of the Amsterdam section of a homework assistance company.
Taken all of this together, it were three busy years, so after my graduation of the bachelor I decided to take a year off and went travelling through India, Nepal and South-East Asia. That was an amazing experience and made me think of my future plans.

Attending the master programme Brain and Cognitive Sciences was the outcome. I’m not finished with studying the brain and want to figure out if I would like to become a neuroscientist. I chose for the track NeuroScience because I was always interested in the causes of our behaviour. I’m not satisfied with a theoretical model, I want to know the exact genes that could be altered, the neurotransmitters that are involved and the brain areas that are activated. However I don’t want to stick to the small level of individual cells and want to make the leap to the higher levels of behaviour. That’s why I chose for an interdisciplinary master.

My vision for my future: doing interdisciplinary research on dyslexia, to figure out what is really going on inside my head……..