Maarten van Zalk
Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Professor of Developmental Psychology,
Örebro University and Utrecht University
Maarten van Zalk received his Ph.D. with honours in
Psychology at Utrecht University in 2009. He was
appointed
Associate Professor at Örebro University in 2010 and at Utrecht
University in 2012. His research
concerns social relationships, personality
and problematic development during teenage years. He has
specialized in advanced quantitative methodologies, such as
structural equation modelling and social network
analyses. Since
2010, he has been the Swedish coordinator of the European
Collaborative Research Project
entitled ‘Social Influence in
Dynamic Networks’. His past and current positions
and fellowships include the
following: Visiting Scholar
at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and
at Sidney Sussex College, University
of Cambridge;
Associate Professor at Masaryk University, Brno; Marie Curie
Fellow at Örebro University;
and co-editor of a 2013 Journal of
Research on Adolescence special issue on social network analyses
entitled ‘Network–Behavior Dynamics’.
Maarten van Zalk has as a main author published in leading
international psychology journals. Key
publications include ‘In
the Eye of the Beholder: Perceived, Actual, and Peer-rated Similarity
in Personality,
Communication, and Friendship Intensity
during the Acquaintanceship Process’, in the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology (2009). Another example is ‘It
Takes Three: Selection, Influence, and
De-selection Processes of
Depression in Adolescent Peer Networks’, in the journal Developmental
Psychology (2010). He has received a series of prizes and
awards for his published work, including the 2010
Young Scholar
Award by the European Association for Research on Adolescence.
During his time at SCAS, he plans to continue his work on
problematic personality and antisocial behaviour
during teenage
years. He aims to extend this earlier work by focusing on the
processes that explain how
problematic personality traits influence
crime and violence. He will study teenagers’ social interactions
with parents and peers and their hormonal processes to
elucidate how personality traits affect delinquent
and aggressive
behaviour.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2015-16.