Ili Ma
Assistant professor
- Name
- Dr. I. Ma
- Telephone
- 071 5272727
- i.ma@fsw.leidenuniv.nl
- ORCID iD
- 0000-0003-2971-4085
Ili Ma is an assistant professor in the Developmental and Educational Psychology unit of the Institute of Psychology at Leiden University.
Ili Ma is an assistant professor in the Developmental and Educational Psychology unit of the Institute of Psychology at Leiden University.
Ili is broadly interested in how adolescents acquire information and how this shapes their beliefs, attitudes, and decisions. Her research focuses on how adolescents’ and young adults’ views on societal issues are shaped by exposure to online (dis)information and digital manipulation. By combining social media data, behavioral experiments, computational methods, and interventions, her work seeks both to advance fundamental understanding and to strengthen young people’s resilience to manipulation. She is the principal investigator of the Cognition in Development (CoDe) Lab, which actively welcomes collaborations with societal partners, including youth organisations, schools, and policymakers.
For more information see the CoDe Lab website
Funding
• 2025 ERC Starting Grant
• 2024 Starter grant
• 2024 NWO XS
• 2020 National Science Foundation
• 2018 NWO Rubicon
Teaching
• Developmental and Educational Psychology (Coordinator)
• Master theses
• Bachelor projects
• Research internships
• Perspective on Career Planning
• The Adolescent Brain
Committees
• Theme lead Technology and Society: AI for Humans, Society and Science
• Bachelor Education Committee member
• Faculty Council member (2023-2025)
Assistant professor
- Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences
- Psychology
- Developmental and Educational Psychology
- Ma I., Mubashir S., Kozyreva A. & Bos W. van den (2026), Understanding the impact of misinformation on adolescents, Nature Human Behaviour 10: 18-28.
- Holton E., Opheusden B. van, Grohn J., Ward H., Grogan J., Lockwood P.L., Ma I., Ma W.J. & Manohar S.G. (2025), Disentangling the component processes in complex planning impairments following ventromedial prefrontal lesions, Journal of Neuroscience 45(12): e1814242025.
- Topel S., Ma I., Duijvenvoorde A.C.K. van, van Steenbergen H. & Bruijn E.R.A. de (2024), Adapting to uncertainty: the role of anxiety and fear of negative evaluation in learning in social and non-social contexts, Journal of Affective Disorders 363: 310-319.
- Topel S., Ma I., Sleutels J., Steenbergen H. van, Bruijn E.R.A. de & Duijvenvoorde A.C.K. van (2023), Expecting the unexpected: a review of learning under uncertainty across development, Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience 23: 718-738.
- Zanolie C.K.K., Ma I., Bos M.G.N., Schreuders E., Vandenbroucke A.R.E., van Hoorn J., van Duijvenvoorde A.C.K., Wierenga L.M., Crone E.A.M. & Güroglu B. (2022), Understanding the dynamics of the developing adolescent brain through team science, Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience 16: .
- Ma I., Westhoff B. & Duijvenvoorde A.C.K. van (2022), Uncertainty about others’ trustworthiness increases during adolescence and guides social information sampling, Scientific Reports 12(7634): .