Lilian Jans-Beken was born in Venray in The Netherlands on the 3rd of October 1969. She left high school prematurely at 16 and started working in information and communication technology and transportation. In 2007, she decided to change career and started studying applied psychology at Hogeschool NTI with a major in clinical- and health psychology. Psychology captured her full interest and she proceeded her study in psychology at the Open University Netherlands where she received her bachelor’s degree in 2013. Because of her interest in personal strengths and resilience, she entered the master of Lifespan Psychology also at the Open University Netherlands, which is grounded on positive psychology. One year later she graduated with honours with a thesis based on a validation study of gratitude questionnaires. This master thesis was nominated for the Jan Brouwer Thesis Award in 2015 because of the high-quality paper written and thorough research conducted as a master student. Her PhD project as an external PhD candidate started immediately after graduation in March 2014 and her research proposal about the connection between gratitude and mental health was approved in November that year by the research committee of the Open University. She visited conferences, congresses, seminars, courses, and workshops to broaden her scientific knowledge and connect with researchers and other people in science and beyond.

During her PhD, from 2015 to 2017, Lilian worked as a voluntary scientific core member for Immunowell, a foundation that is working on defining a research program on ‘Immune Fitness’ and an ‘experiential expert’ platform called ImmunoWeb. In 2015 she was elected as participant of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and Hendrik Muller Summer Seminar covering the topic of academic freedom and scientific integrity. Together with the other participants of this edition, Lilian took the initiative to set up the KNAW Hendrik Muller Netwerk to provide a network of promising scientists and highly educated professionals for the future; participants of next editions of the summer seminar are eligible for membership. Due to this summer seminar she learned about open science, which she considers very important, and therefore became a member of the Society of the Improvement of Psychological Science, an organisation that wants to bring together scholars to improve methods and practices in psychological science. She is also a member of the International Society of Quality of Life Studies, an interdisciplinary and professional organisation that connects scientists doing quality of life or well-being research in the basic and applied social and behavioural sciences. She also is a peer reviewer for several scientific journals and writes book reviews of psychology books for the journal of the Dutch Association of Psychologists, De Psycholoog.

Besides her PhD research, she started working as a freelance supervisor and teacher for private psychology students and several higher education institutions. She currently proceeds working as an independent researcher and is always looking for collaboration.