Esther Aarts


Esther Aarts is a cognitive neuroscientist working at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour. Aarts is known for her work on how food affects brain function, including research on the gut-brain axis, nutritional neuroscience, and obesity.

Education and career

Aarts was born in Eindhoven in 1980. She studied biology at Radboud University in Nijmegen, then completed a M.Sc. in Neurobiology in 2004. She obtained her Ph.D. in Cognitive Neurosciences at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour in 2009 under supervision of Ardi Roelofs and Miranda van Turennout.
Between 2008 and 2010, Aarts held a postdoctoral psychiatry position with Roshan Cools at Radboud University Medical Center. Afterwards, she got a Niels Stensen postdoctoral fellow position at University of California, Berkeley with Mark D'Esposito until 2012. In 2012, Aarts returned to the Cools lab, specialising on the effects of food reward on cognition. Aarts has held her role as an associate principal investigator and coordinator of the Food & Cognition research group at the Donders Institute since 2017. In 2022, she was appointed as a full professor of Nutritional Neuroscience at the Faculty of Sciences of Radboud University.

Research

Aarts' early research investigated motivational control associated with poor eating habits, as she studied how variations in the activation of certain brain regions that are dopamine-rich predict whether someone will put effort into getting a sugary reward when they are no longer hungry. More recent research investigates the behaviour of people towards food from a decisional and motivational perspective, and seeks to understand the effects that food decisions and emotions have on brain and behaviour in obesity, in aging and in psychiatric conditions. In studying these effects of food on brain functioning she takes the gut microbiome and the immune system into account. To examine body-brain connections, Aarts uses brain scans, biological measurements, and interventions with food supplements, medication, or lifestyle coaching.

Selected publications

*