Alexander Hooyberg
I am a PhD student at the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ, Ostend, host-institution), where I investigate the effects of exposure to the Belgian coast on diverse health outcomes. During my PhD, I am supervised by a large team of academic promotors and experts from Ghent University (UGent, Ghent, Department of Public Health and Primary Care, Department of Sociology, academic promotors) and the University of Hasselt (UHasselt, Hasselt), which make it a transdisciplinary joint-interdisciplinary PhD. The aims are to disentangle the psychological and physiological responses to different coastal environments and to explore the sociological drivers behind these effects. To do so, I integrate a range of innovative techniques in valid experimental protocols to gain comprehensive perspectives, including eye-tracking, virtual reality, and many psycho-physiological measurements. Analysing the obtained big data from my experiments or from large-scale surveys is what I like the most. I obtained a Master in Biology at Ghent University in 2018.
Keywords: Belgian coast, health and wellbeing, psycho-physiology