Associate Professor. Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands, and Visiting Professor KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.

Ann Meulders is an associate professor at Maastricht University (The Netherlands) and a visiting professor at KU Leuven (Belgium). She is an experimental psychologist and pain scientist with extensive expertise in learning theory and laboratory conditioning models. Her work concerns psychological mechanisms in the transition from acute to chronic pain. Her work focusses on learning processes in pain-related fear and avoidance behavior, and more recently also the social factors influencing these pain-related learning processes. International recognition of her work is reflected in a number of prestigious awards and grants, exemplary are the EFIC Grünenthal award (EGG2012) for her project “Fear generalization as a pathway to chronic widespread pain”, the highly competitive NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) Innovational Vidi Research Grant to pioneer research on operant learning processes in pain-related avoidance behavior, and the recent NWO Open Competition grant, to investigate whether social support during exposure treatment for chronic pain can boost extinction learning and thus treatment effects, as well as preventing relapse. She enjoys mentoring early career researchers: she has (co-)supervised 16 PhD students (10 completed/6 ongoing) and 5 postdocs (3 completed/2 ongoing), many of whom continued to have successful scientific careers. She published more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and 5 book chapters. She has been an invited speaker at several international pain and psychology conferences and is currently on the editorial board of The Journal of Pain and the Journal of Experimental Psychopathology, and was an Associate editor of Pain.