Portrait of Sylvie Willems
New 2023 Lecturers Honoured
Lecturer in Adult Clinical Neuropsychology.
Could you briefly describe your background, your research topics and your conception of university teaching?
My career began in 2000 in the Neuropsychology and Cognitive Psychopathology Unit at the University of Geneva, headed by Prof. M. Van der Linden, where I tackled various research questions such as the memorization of events during general anesthesia and the evaluation of impulsivity. I then moved to ULiège, where I was awarded an FNRS fellowship, followed by a contract as a research fellow. From 2010 onwards, my career took a big step forward with a position as coordinator of the young Clinique psychologique et logopédique universitaire (CPLU - ULiège), under the status of logistician.
My research interests lie in the fields of neuropsychology and cognitive psychology. The first area focuses on how memory, inference and decision-making processes interact to influence our memory judgments, and the associated phenomenology, in people with memory disorders (e.g., people with amnesic syndrome or Alzheimer's disease) and the general population (from a lifespan perspective: from young children to the elderly). A second focus is cognitive intervention and its effectiveness. This research orientation naturally led me to turn to single-case experimental designs and randomized controlled trials. A third axis concerns the clinical evaluation of personal memory. Finally, my latest role as coordinator of the CPLU has also led me to develop a fourth area of interest around more cross-cutting issues linked to clinical training (for example, training in clinical reasoning or clinical communication), but also linked to the broad subjects ofevidence-based practice in psychology and patient partnership.
One of the missions of the clinical neuropsychology teacher is to build bridges between theoretical teaching and research on the one hand, and practice on the other. The teacher must also inspire students by transmitting a genuine passion for their future profession, and helping them to become critically-minded future clinicians. Another challenge is to develop in future clinicians an empathy driven by curiosity about others, the desire to understand the reality of each patient, while respecting all its complexity. In this way, I believe we have a role to play in making them aware of their own biases, tendencies towards reductionism and various prejudices that can hinder the quality of care they will promulgate.
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