Yvonne de Kort is a Full Professor and Chair of Environmental Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction, and vice dean of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences at the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. With her group, she investigates the effects of lighting conditions on human functioning (e.g., alertness, stress, sleep, and health), specifically targeting light effects for day-active people in real-world conditions. This explicitly includes both visual effects and circadian and acute effects beyond vision, via our biological clock and neural regions related to alertness and mood.  Additional research topics include the restorative and invigorating effects of light and nature scenes.

The research brings together insights from psychology, chronobiology, and neuroscience and aims to translate fundamental insights in human responses to light to implications for the design of environments, lighting scenarios, and intelligent lighting solutions. We use lighting technology and Virtual Reality to tune light spectra, temporal and spatial dynamics. We investigate their effects through self-reports, psychophysiology (e.g., HRV, EEG), and task performance and employ EMA, (ambulatory) sensing, advanced statistics, data science, and AI approaches. And part of the research takes place in living labs and in the field, where the aim is to test the effects of interventions and interactive installations in real-life situations. 

Yvonne de Kort obtained her Ph.D. in Environmental Psychology from TU/e. Yvonne manages the interdepartmental Sound Lighting research program in TU/e’s Intelligent Lighting Institute and the Mental Health program in TU/e’s Center for Humans and Technology. She coordinates national and European projects

Yvonne is the project coordinator of LIGHTCAP. She also mentors three ESRs – Elif, Vaida and Richard – who are all active in work package 2 and are co-mentored by Karin Smolders, Luc Schlangen and Antal Haans. We will adopt existing paradigms used to investigate to what extent spectral and time-related light modulations affect acute NIF effects, using metameric light under well-controlled conditions in the lab. Elif has a warm interest in EEG-based measures, particularly connectivity indicators. Vaida will be focusing particularly on patients suffering from various sleep disorders with residual daytime sleepiness and reduced vigilance and alertness. Her work will involve monitoring in the laboratory, but also in the field, over prolonged time (multiple weeks) with wearables and novel unobtrusive measures, to investigate NIF effects of light on attention, cognition and sleep. Richard work focuses on night time, outdoor settings. He hopes to gain a better understanding of the role of attention in the formation of environmental appraisals, and pedestrian safety perceptions in particular. We also will explore what characteristics of street lighting, in terms of for example horizontal and vertical illuminance, uniformity and spectral power distributions are needed to optimize attention and / or alertness when forming safety perceptions.