Contact information

E-mail address: [email protected]

Profile

I am an Associate Professor at the Amsterdam UMC, Department of Epidemiology and Data Science, and Vice-Director of the Amsterdam Public Health research institute (APH). I lead the Upstream Team, a research group dedicated to understanding how environments shape lifestyle behaviours and chronic disease risk.

My work focuses on how environments influence lifestyle behaviours and related health outcomes, and how these can be changed through upstream, system-level approaches such as policy interventions. Using rich individual- and environmental-level (exposome) data from the Netherlands and across Europe, my team applies innovative methods to understand and address health inequalities at their roots.

I obtained my PhD in 2011 with the thesis “Efforts to prevent diabetes and cardiovascular diseases in primary care”, after earlier studies in physiotherapy and public health research at Utrecht and VU University Amsterdam.

I have coordinated or co-led multiple large international consortia, including the EU-FP7 SPOTLIGHT project, the JPI DEDIPAC and Policy Evaluation Network (PEN), and the national Supreme Nudge trial. I currently coordinate the Horizon Europe project OBCT (Obesity: Biological, socioCultural and environmental risk Trajectories; www.obct.nl), and lead the Geohealth Cohort Consortium (GECCO; www.gecco.nl) – a cross-national research infrastructure linking environmental exposures to health outcomes across 23 large cohorts. I also serve as work package leader in STAGE, a Horizon Europe project on ageing and multimorbidity (https://stage-healthyageing.eu/). 

I am Associate Editor of Obesity Facts and Editorial Board member of the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity (IJBNPA).

My long-term goal is to advance the science and policy relevance of upstream prevention; creating environments that make healthy choices easy, equitable and sustainable.