Karolien Adriaens (PhD) has been working in the People and Well-being research group since 2021. She participates in several research projects on transgressive behaviour: Safe Sport Allies and Safe Para Sport Allies, Safe Sport Project, ASOIF project
Karolien Adriaens holds a Bachelor of Applied Psychology (Thomas More, 2011), a Master of Clinical Psychology (KU Leuven, 2014) and a Doctor of Psychology (KU Leuven, 2020). In 2015 and 2016, she worked as a supervisor in mobile teams for people with long-term mental vulnerability. She also worked as a clinical psychologist in the Tender Activation Care project (collaboration between VDAB and psychiatry) where she provided psychosocial counselling to people with mental/medical vulnerability during their trajectory towards the labour market. Between 2016 and 2021, Karolien worked as a PhD student and postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven. Her research focused on investigating the effectiveness of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) in the context of smoking cessation. Through experimental and mainly practice-based research, Karolien showed that e-cigarettes are an effective aid, and that when smokers quit smoking using an e-cigarette, they do at least as well as smokers using traditional smoking aids (e.g. Nicotine patches).
Since October 2021, Karolien has been working as a researcher in the People and Well-being Research Group, research line 'Safeguarding Sport & Society'. She mainly conducts practice-based research on bystander behaviour and the prevention of harassment and abuse against children. Karolien takes on the day-to-day management of the Erasmus+ Project Safe Sport Allies, which is coordinated by the research line. In Safe Sport Allies, researchers, sports actors and victim organisations develop an intervention in which trainers, club administrators, parents and athletes are trained to recognise, correctly assess and adequately respond to signals of cross-border behaviour. Karolien is also involved in other projects in the prevention of interpersonal violence (Safe Para Sport Allies, SAFE-sport, WWYD, ...).
Finally, Karolien supervises Applied Psychology students in their undergraduate thesis as well as external research trainees.
