Prof. Petri J. C. M. Embregts occupies the Chair for People with an Intellectual Disability: Psychopathology and treatment since 2011. From this Chair, she founded the Academic Collaborative Center for Living with an Intellectual Disability (AWVB). The AWVB facilitates long-term collaboration between 14 care organizations for people with an intellectual disability, the Advocacy organization for people with an intellectual disability (LFB) and Tilburg University.

Within the AWVB, Embregts works on research projects using a tailor-made approach to empower people with an intellectual disability, their relatives and the professionals involved. How can people with an intellectual disability control and shape their own lives? How do parents do that? And what demands does this make of direct support staff, psychologists and care organizations? Embregts tries to find answers to these and other questions in co-creation with researchers, professionals, people with an intellectual disability and their relatives. By building on links between everyday practice, training and science, she develops, and subsequently shares, new knowledge based on equality. Embregts focuses on the following research themes:

• Enhancing the intrinsic power of people with an intellectual disability and their relatives. Research projects that directly enhance the intrinsic power of people with an intellectual disability and their relatives by, for example, increasing their autonomy, range of choice, experiential expertise and, thus, their well-being and quality of life, and decreasing restraint interventions, are central to this theme.
• Training and coaching of professionals. Under this theme, research is carried out into the training, behavior, and insights of direct support staff in relation to people with an intellectual disability. Attention is paid to supporting people with an intellectual disability in the local community, on the one hand, and intensive coaching and treatment of people with an intellectual disability and behavioral problems, on the other. Practice-based interventions for direct support staff are made explicit, standardized and evaluated. In addition to intervention research, exploratory research also takes place in order to obtain more insight into factors that determine behavior and beliefs of direct support staff.

Within the AWVB, Embregts carries out a variety of activities to optimize to share the knowledge developed with those in everyday practice, for example by facilitating communities. Furthermore, in order to translate new knowledge into education, Embregts collaborates with educational institutes both at and outside Tilburg University, such as the department of Medical and Clinical Psychology, RINO Zuid, universities of applied sciences and Regional Training Centers (ROCs) for secondary vocational education.