Dr. Meulders is an Associate Professor of Experimental Health Psychology at Maastricht University and a Visiting Professor of Health Psychology at the KU Leuven. Her work concerns psychological mechanisms in the transition from acute to chronic pain. Her work focusses on learning processes in pain-related fear and more recently on avoidance. International recognition of her work is reflected in a number of prestigious awards and grants, exemplary are the prestigious EFIC Grünenthal award (EGG2012) for her project “Fear generalization as a pathway to chronic widespread pain”, and the highly competitive NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) Innovational Vidi Research Grant to pioneer research on operant learning processes in pain-related avoidance behavior. She published more than 90 peer-reviewed journal articles and 5 book chapters. She has been an invited speaker at several international pain and psychology conferences and was an Associate editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychopathology and Pain.