Laura Dewitte

Laura's research focuses on well-being in old age, particularly among older adults living with dementia. She studies how daily feelings and thoughts contribute to a sense of meaning in life, and how subjective well-being can be measured in the context of dementia. Her work combines multiple methods, including retrospective questionnaires, experience sampling, and in-depth interviews. In addition to her work on dementia and topics of existential-positive psychology, she is also interested in open science and psychological research methods. ​

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Laura earned her master’s degree in Clinical and Health Psychology from KU Leuven in July 2015. For her master’s thesis, she collaborated in the Reproducibility Project Psychology under the supervision of prof. Wolf Vanpaemel. She completed her clinical internship at the University Psychiatric Center in Leuven, where she worked with older adults experiencing neurocognitive challenges.​

In October 2015, she joined the Meaning Research in Late Life team led by prof. Jessie Dezutter as a PhD student, and in 2016 she received a PhD Fellowship grant for fundamental research from the Research Foundations Flanders (FWO). In 2019, she was a visiting scholar for two months in the PATH-lab of prof. Patrick Hill at the Washington University in St. Louis.

Since completing her PhD in September 2020, she has continued her research as a postdoctoral scholar within the Meaning Research Late Life team. For her postdoctoral work, she was awarded a Postdoctoral Mandate of KU Leuven in 2020, a junior postdoctoral fellowship from FWO in 2021, and a senior postdoctoral fellowship from FWO in 2024. 

From April 2022 to April 2023, Laura was a visiting scholar in the Irish lab of prof. Muireann Irish at the Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney.