I am a post-doctoral researcher working with Prof. Pascal Antoine in the LabEx Distalz. We are working on new ways to understand how providing informal care to a relative can have an influence on psychological well-being. Until now, most studies (including ours) have used retrospective measures (i.e., questionnaires) to explore caregiver and care-related variables. The issue is that this information only informs us about one time point that we now know to widely differ over the day or the week. We therefore aim at developing new ways to explore these associations, mainly through the use of Intensive Longitudinal Methods or Ecological Momentary Assessment.

Do not hesitate to visit my ResearchGate profile to stay updated about our work!

I have done my PhD at UCLouvain in Belgium under the supervision of Prof. Emmanuelle Zech. I was funded by the F.R.S. - FNRS, the Belgian Funds for Scientific Research. The focus of this work was to explore the concept of “burnout” in the context of informal care. To do so, we first performed a meta-analytic work to explore if being an informal caregiver can represent an additional weight on family/parental and professional burnout (Gérain & Zech, 2020). We then developed a theoretical framework to explore informal caregiver burnout per se, with the objective of better understating the determinants of distress, but also to clarify theoretical issues in the current literature (such as the conceptualization of subjective burden) (Gérain & Zech, 2019). Based on that framework, we have performed different investigations of what we called informal caregiver burnout, exploring its determinants, but also its potential consequences. Part of that work is published (e.g., Gérain & Zech, 2021), in review, or in preparation at this stage.

During my PhD, I had the opportunity to be an invited researcher at the UMCG in Groningen (Netherlands) under the supervision of Prof. Mariët Hagedoorn. There, we worked on dyadic adjustment of couple facing a disease of one of the partners (e.g., in the case of kidney transplant).  

I was also part of the Junior Board of the Belgian Association for Psychological Sciences (BAPS), fostering the development of a network for young psychology researchers in Belgium and abroad by organizing workshops and meetings.

For more information, do not hesitate to visit

My researchgate profile https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Pierre_Gerain

My academic CV https://osf.io/xyg8u