Speakers

Justine is a geospatial scientist (giscientist/spatial data scientist, gis analyst) with 25+ years global experience. She works at the intersection of giscience and health where she addresses broad issues related to human health risk in dynamically changing environments. She takes an integrated approach to health centered around: risk, response, and communication examining the causes and consequences of risk from a local and global perspective across spatial and temporal scales.

Özlem Bozkurt is currently working as a projectleader of an EU LIFE funded project LIFE CRITICAL at the municipality of Dordrecht (NL). She is part of the Green-Blue City team whose focus lies on biodiversity, climate adaptation and a healthy living environment.

She holds a master’s in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Maastricht, a specialisation in Nutrition and Health from The Catholic University of Louvain, a master’s in Epidemiology and a PhD in Epidemiology (2011-dept. Parmacoepidemiology and Pharmacogenetics Utrecht University/NL) from the University of Utrecht.

From 2007 till 2020 she worked as deputy to the director for the Flemish Government of Health (BE) as an Environmental Health Expert. Her topics of expertise were Heat and Ozone, Zoönosis and Indoor Air Quality. She worked on several public campaigns on these subjects and she contributed to the first WHO guidelines for indoor air quality (2010). She also set up an Educational program for environmental healthcare specialist.

She got introduced into the world of citizen science while working on the EU funded project ‘samen voor zuivere lucht’ at the Flanders Environmental Agency (VMM) in Belgium. Since then her focus is on citizen engagement and especially citizen science and citizen assemblies.

The persisting global inequities in health are the driving force behind my transdisciplinary research and education. My work focuses on global and planetary health, health equity, maternal health, and research capacity strengthening in my current appointment as Associate Professor of Global Health at the University Medical Center (UMC) and Utrecht University (UU) in the Netherlands.

I graduated cum laude from University College Utrecht (NL, 2008) with a major in pre-medical sciences and a minor in public health and development studies. Subsequently, I completed a MSc in Social Epidemiology at University College London (UK, 2010), a MSc in Medicine/Clinical Research (NL, 2013) and a PhD in Clinical Epidemiology at Utrecht University (NL, 2016).

Other academic and societal activities include(d) memberships of institutional committees, academic/research networks, and WHO advisory committees. I (co-)founded the Dutch Global Health Film Festival, chair the Dutch Global Health Knowledge Center, am vice-chair of Simavi’s Supervisory Board and deputy editor of the World Health Federation’s scientific journal Global Heart.

Dr. Anneke Damen is an assistant professor at the Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care. She obtained her PhD in clinical epidemiology in 2018 at the University Medical Center Utrecht (Thesis ‘Systematic reviews and meta-analyses of prediction model studies: methods and applications’). Her research focuses on methodology for systematic reviews and meta-analyses of prediction models. She works for Cochrane Netherlands, is the coordinator of the Cochrane Prognosis Methods Group, and is associate editor for the journal Cochrane Evidence Synthesis and Methods. Anneke teaches Epidemiology students and fellow researchers on systematic reviews of intervention studies, diagnostic studies, prognosis studies, and individual participant data meta-analysis. Furthermore, she conducted and coordinated systematic reviews to inform medical guidelines.

Originally from New Zealand and with backgrounds in Medicine, Global Health, and Environmental Health, George is currently the deputy lead of the Exposome and Planetary Health team at the University Medical Centre Utrecht. His research and teaching activities focus on the often inequitable ways in which disruptions to our natural systems impact human health in a variety of settings with partners from across the world including Asia, Africa, and the Americas. He is very active in the Planetary Health field, sitting on the board for the Planetary Health Life Sciences community at Utrecht University and is part of the coordination team for the European Hub of the Planetary Health Alliance.

Toine Egberts (1965) obtained his PharmD in 1990 at the University of Groningen, and was thereafter trained as clinical pharmacist. In 1994, he started his PhD project at the department of Pharmacoepidemiology & Clinical Pharmacology of Utrecht University in collaboration with the Netherlands Pharmacovigilance Foundation ‘Lareb’. In 1997 he defended his thesis entitled ‘Pharmacoepidemiologic approaches to the evaluation of antidepressant drugs’. During his PhD-project he obtained the Master of Science degree in clinical epidemiology from the Netherlands Institute of Health Sciences.

He was appointed in 2001 as professor of clinical pharmacoepidemiology at the department of Pharmacoepidemiology & Clinical Pharmacology. Since 2006 he is also a professor of clinical pharmacy at the medical faculty of Utrecht University.

During 2006 – 2017 he was chief pharmacist of the department of clinical pharmacy of the University Medical Center Utrecht. In addition, he was during 5 years member of the board of directors of the division of laboratories and pharmacy of that hospital.

Since november 2018 he is director of doctoral education of the Graduate School of Life Sciences of Utrecht University. Coaching of PhD students gives him energy as it nicely balances research into medical/pharmaceutical puzzles with personal development of young academics. He had the pleasure to guide over 70 PhD students towards the ‘hora est’. He is (co)author of around 500 international peer reviewed scientific publications. He has always been deeply involved in education, especially the training of hospital pharmacists.

His aim as researcher, educator and as hospital pharmacist is to reduce damage of medicines to people’s lives and to the environment.

Since 2015 Egil Fischer focusses on the dynamics of spread of plasmid-mediated antimicrobial resistance in livestock. The study of dynamical systems, such as the spread of pAMR, require interpretation with dynamic mathematical models, which should be challenged by empirical and observational data. Egil Fischer is a theoretical biologist and epidemiologist, trying to combine experimental data with mathematical models.

Egil Fischer graduated from Wageningen University in theoretical biology and ecological crop protection. During his PhD studies at the Erasmus University Rotterdam on the spread of leprosy he also obtained a MSc-degree in epidemiology. After his PhD-studies, he started a position as researcher at the Central Veterinary Institute, where he conducted policy supporting studies on a variety of livestock diseases and zoonoses. He also was project leader of several projects as well as the vice-coordinator of the EMIDA-ERANET VICE project. From 2015 onwards he is a universitair docent  (UK: University Lecturer; USA: Assistant Professor) at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

He has been trained in the design and moderation of workshops, and has lead several scientific workshops for policy making and risk assessment, as well workshops in improvisation theater.

Egil Fischer teaches several courses in the Bachelor phase of the veterinary curriculum, and is coordinator of three courses on veterinary epidemiology specialization of the MSc Epidemiology of the Utrecht University. On a voluntary basis, he teaches epidemiology on highschools on epidemiology for 5^th and 6^th  grade pupils.

Prof. Oscar H. Franco is Professor of Public Health, and Director of the Department of Global Public Health & Bioethics at the Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care, and Chair of Healthy Living at University Medical Centre Utrecht, Utrecht University. Furthermore, Oscar is Adjunct Professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the University of Bern, the National University of Mar del Plata, Argentina; Honorary Professor at Universidad Javeriana, Bogota, Colombia, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China; and scientific advisor for the French television channel France24 (until end 2023). Prof. Franco has published over 800 publications and has a H-index of 112 (WoS).

Prof. Franco obtained his MD at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia in 1998. In 2001 he moved to the Netherlands to complete MSc and DSc degrees in clinical epidemiology and a PhD in public health and cardiovascular disease prevention (2005) at the Erasmus University Medical Center. Following a postdoc at Erasmus MC, he moved to the UK where he was a senior public health epidemiologist at Unilever England, assistant professor of public health at the University of Warwick, and then director of the MPhil program and clinical lecturer in public health at the University of Cambridge. In 2012 Prof. Franco returned to ErasmusMC to the department of epidemiology where he worked as professor of preventive medicine and the principal investigator of the cardiovascular epidemiology group. He also founded and directed the Rotterdam Intergenerational Ageing Research Center, ErasmusAGE, and he was cofounder and CEO of Erasmus Epidemiology Resources. From 2018 until 2022, Oscar moved to the University of Bern as Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health and Director of the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine (ISPM) at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

Diederick (Rick) E. Grobbee, MD, PhD, FESC, is Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at Utrecht University. After his medical degree at Utrecht University, he was a resident in internal medicine, completed a PhD in Epidemiology at Erasmus University, spent some time at Harvard University in Boston and McGill University in Montreal before he was appointed Professor of Clinical Epidemiology in Rotterdam in 1993. In 1996 he moved to Utrecht where he founded the Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care of which he was chair for almost 15 years. In 2008 he established, and became Chief Scientific Officer of, Julius Clinical Ltd. (www.juliusclinical.com), and Academic Contract Research Organisation currently conducting clinical trials in over 30 countries. In 2010 he was appointed Distinguished University Professor of International Health Sciences and Global Health by the board of Utrecht University. Professor Grobbee directs a national and international program of research, teaching and training currently spanning over 30 countries. He has been a principal investigator in many large scale epidemiologic studies and randomized trials of interventions for the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular diseases. Since 2010 he is increasingly addressing Global Health issues (www.globalhealth.eu), and initiated a global educational platform (www.elevatehealth.eu). Professor Grobbee has published over a 1400 scientific papers, chapters and books, supervised 160 PhD fellows (Hirsch index WOS, 160). He holds honorary appointments in Sydney and Kuala Lumpur, and is the editor in chief of Global Heart. In 2017 he was knighted (Knight in the Order of the Dutch Lion).

Daniël Groos werkt sinds 2023 als legal researcher bij Lygature binnen het Health law, Privacy en Ethics portfolio. Hij ondersteunt verschillende onderzoeksconsortia in de verantwoorde omgang met patiëntengegevens. Het verenigen van datagedreven onderzoek met de belangen en verwachtingen van patiënten en burgers is de rode draad in zijn werkzaamheden. Een thema dat daarbij vaak terugkeert is het ontwaren van de scheidslijn tussen persoonsgegevens en anonieme gegevens.

Ms. Joyeeta Gupta (Netherlands citizen and overseas citizen of India), Professor of Environment and Development, Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of Amsterdam; and Professor on Sustainability, IHE Delft Institute for Water Education

Joyeeta Gupta is Professor of environment and development in the global south at the University of Amsterdam and professor at IHE-Delft Institute for Water Education. Previously, she was professor on Climate Change Policy and Law at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. She won the highest academic recognition in the Netherlands – the Spinoza prize in 2023 (1.5 M € for 2024-2029). Professor Gupta has a European Research Council Advanced Grant (€2.5 M for 2021-2026) for climate research.

She is on the editorial board of six journals, was lead author in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1998-2014) and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. She has supervised 33 PhDs and is currently supervising 20 PhD students. She has led, or participated in, acquiring 60 projects from funding agencies.

Joyeeta Gupta was co-chair of UNEP’s Global Environment Outlook-6: Healthy Planet, Healthy People (2016-2019). She is completing her co-chair role of the Earth Commission (2019-2024) which has published 20 papers including in Nature and presented results at the World Economic Forum on 18 January in the WEF in Davos, 2023 and 2024. She has just been appointed by the UN Secretary General as co-chair of the Ten High-Level Representatives of Civil Society, Private Sector and Scientific Community to Promote Science, Technology and Innovation for the SDGs for 2024-2025.

Lotty Hooft has a multifaceted career encompassing healthcare research, education, and leadership. Holding a postgraduate degree in Epidemiology and a MSc in Medical Biology, she completed her doctorate at VU University Amsterdam with a thesis on molecular imaging in rare diseases, particularly focusing on thyroid cancer and positron emission tomography. Throughout her career, she has obtained certifications in teaching qualifications, further solidifying her expertise in education.

Currently, she is the Head of the department of Epidemiology & Health Economics and holds the position of Professor of Evidence Synthesis and Knowledge Translation in Healthcare at the Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care, University Medical Center Utrecht. As the Director of Cochrane Netherlands and a former coordinator of the Methodology Research program at the Julius Center, she has played key roles in advancing evidence synthesis and knowledge translation in healthcare.

Moreover, Lotty established the Dutch Trial Register, chairs the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) and contributes to the WHO Essential Diagnostic List, illustrative of her influence in global healthcare initiatives. She also performs a substantial amount of commissioned work for the National Health Care Institute. Her research endeavors have resulted in a multitude of peer-reviewed publications in prestigious journals and policy reports, covering a wide array of topics in healthcare. Furthermore, she has secured substantial funding for research projects and has been recognized with awards and honors for her outstanding contributions to academia and healthcare.

With a track record of supervising numerous PhD and MSc students and a commitment to capacity building and mentorship, Lotty continues to shape the future of evidence-based healthcare through her leadership, research, and educational initiatives.

Jente Houweling werkt sinds 2021 bij het Rijksinstituut voor Volksgezondheid en Milieu (RIVM), aanvankelijk als Rijks I-trainee, en combineert nu haar promotieonderzoek met haar functie als datasteward. Samen met haar collega-datastewards streeft zij ernaar om een duurzame benadering van open en FAIR data te realiseren, zowel als kennisinstituut als overheidsinstantie.

Tabea is a PhD candidate at the Julius Center, UMC Utrecht. Her research focuses on systematic review methodology, especially in prediction research and evidence synthesis from clinical trial registries. She is involved in several international research collaborations, including the update of the prediction model risk of bias assessment tool PROBAST+AI.

With degrees from the Technical University of Munich and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and academic exchanges with Keio University Tokyo and the University of Sydney, she aims to promote evidence-based healthcare for global communities.

I am a PhD candidate at the Julius Center, UMC Utrecht. My research interests are safe use of AI and methodology for diagnosis and prognosis studies, particularly missing or imperfect reference standards and AI methodology. Aside from my work as a PhD candidate I am also a team lead at AI Safety Utrecht, where I teach and discuss safe use of AI with (prospective) researchers and policy analysts.

I graduated from University College Utrecht with a major in mathematics and from Leiden University with a masters in Statistics and Data Science.

Caroline Kemunto Kioko is a PhD candidate in Spatio-temporal transmission dynamics of vector-borne diseases in changing environments at the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), Earth Observation department, University of Twente. Her research focuses on integrating epidemiological data with climate and satellite data to study vector-borne diseases. More specifically, she is interested in mosquito-borne and tick-borne diseases in humans. Her work has been published and presented in various conferences and workshops. She has also developed a successful case study on accessibility to health care facilities and malaria prevalence in Kenya and a satellites for health elective course for Master’s students.

Jan van der Laan werkt sinds 2003 als datamanager bij het RIVM. Na de invoering van de AVG in 2018, heeft hij ook de rol van privacycoördinator op zich genomen voor het centrum Voeding, Preventie & Zorg van het RIVM. In zijn dubbelrol als datamanager en privacycoördinator heeft hij vaak te maken gehad met het spanningsveld tussen het delen van (open) data en privacy.

Johan P. Mackenbach was Professor of Public Health at the Department of Public Health at the Erasmus MC, University Medical Center Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His research interests are in social epidemiology, medical demography and health policy, and, more recently, planetary health. He has (co-)authored many papers in international, peer-reviewed scientific journals, as well as a number of books, including ‘Health inequalities: persistence and change in European welfare states’ (Oxford University Press, 2019) and ‘A history of population health: rise and fall of disease in Europe’ (Brill, 2020). He is also a former editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Public Health. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Academia Europaea, received a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), and was elected Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health by the Royal Colleges of Physicians of the United Kingdom. Throughout his career, he has been actively engaged in exchanges between research and policy, among others as a member of the Netherlands’ Health Council and the Council for Public Health and Health Care. After his retirement in 2020 he remains active in various areas, including the new field of planetary health.

Claudia Paris is telecommunications engineer specialised in the design of innovative and automated workflows for the analysis and classification of large-scale Earth observation data for various applications (e.g., forest/agricultural mapping and monitoring) by leveraging high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud computing platforms (Google Earth Engine). She works with multisource remote sensing data (e.g., LiDAR, hyperspectral, multispectral, and high-resolution optical images), multitemporal image analysis, domain adaptation methods, development of ad hoc deep learning solutions, and biophysical parameter estimation. Dr. Paris was 2x the recipient of the prestigious Symposium Prize Paper Award (exceptional paper in terms of content and impact on the Geoscience & Remote Sensing Society) at IEEE IGARSS and 1x the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society 2022 Letters Prize Paper Award (exceptional paper in terms of content and impact on the GRS-Society).

Sanne Peters is an Associate Professor at the University Medical Center Utrecht. She holds a joint appointment as Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London.

She obtained her PhD in Epidemiology from Utrecht University and worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UMC Utrecht, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on sex differences in the prevention, presentation, management, and outcomes of chronic disease, mainly cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Dr. Peters’ research has been supported by several prestigious grants and fellowships, including a 4-year strategic skills development fellowship from the UK Medical Research Council (2017) and 5-year Vidi fellowship from the Dutch Research Council (2021). She is a World Heart Federation Emerging Leader.

She is Nucleus Member of the Population Science and Public Health Section of the European Association of Preventive Cardiology and member of the Science Committee of the World Heart Federation.

Joost van Rosmalen works as an associate professor at the Julius Center of the University Medical Center Utrecht. He is a biostatistician and clinical trial methodologist with a background in econometrics. The main theme of his research is the development and application of innovative methods for clinical trials. The focal areas of his research are statistical methods to include external controls (from previous trials or real-world data sources) in the analysis of clinical trials, as well as the application of Bayesian adaptive clinical trial designs.

Arjan Stegeman is professor of Farm Animal Health at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. He is a veterinarian by training, epidemiologist B and a specialist in population health of the European College of Veterinary Public Health. His research is focused on the epidemiology of infectious diseases in farmed animals aiming to unravel the mechanisms that determine the transmission and spread of infections in animal populations, and establish the effectiveness of intervention measures. For that goal his research group carries out controlled experiments, field studies and mathematical modelling. In addition to research and teaching Arjan is engaged at the science-policy interface, e.g. as chair of the Dutch Expert Group on Animal Diseases and vice-chair of the Outbreak Management Team Zoonoses.

After working as epidemiologist for almost 8 years, Renée Verdiesen recently founded her own company Thoughtful Stories to help scientists and entrepreneurs with successfully sharing their – often complex – stories with their target audience. A vivid example of this is the Cyber Expedition, which she developed in collaboration with the company InstinKct to increase cybersecurity awareness among the Life Sciences and Health professionals.

Prior to her career switch, Renée worked as postdoctoral researcher at the Netherlands Cancer Institute where she studied the etiology of breast cancer subtypes. At that time her goal was to make a meaningful contribution to the prevention and successful treatment of breast cancer. Renée conducted her PhD research at the Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care (PhD thesis: The role of anti-Müllerian hormone in the etiology of cancer and cardiometabolic diseases – Leading lady or best friend?).

Science communication has always been a passion of Renée and has – in her own view – played a significant* role in receiving personal funding and (nominations for) awards.

*pun intended

Sandra de Vries has a Civil Engineering background, specialized in water management. She is founder of the company Pulsaqua, and guest researcher at the Water Management Department of the TU Delft. About 8 years ago she got involved with citizen science methodologies and has since been increasing her knowledge and interest in the implementation of this research methodology for among others opening up the science-policy interface, increasing scientific literacy, increasing awareness, and increasing data collection, processing, or analysis in collaboration with many different citizens. The correct application of this research methodology is not as straightforward as others might think and can entail many more necessary competencies. She has developed her own consulting company Pulsaqua to assist organizations in developing citizen science initiatives, and gives workshops and courses in applying citizen science, also within open science principles. Prior to starting her company, she helped develop the TU Delft citizen science platform WaterLab, with whom she still cooperates closely. Pulsaqua nowadays is a team of 4 highly skilled professionals, applying citizen science practices to water-related issues.

Daniala Weir is an assistant professor of Real-World evidence in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Clinical Pharmacology at Utrecht University. Her program of research is centred around improving the safety and effectiveness of medications for individuals living with multimorbidity across the continuum of care using real-world data. More specifically, this includes optimizing medication prescribing as well as identifying and preventing adverse drug events. She aims to apply advanced quantitative methods (from epidemiology, biostatistics and data science) to clinical problems which impact “real world” patients in every day clinical practice. In particular, she applies methods from predictive modelling within a causal inference framework. Her research considers multiple sources of data across different countries including clinical hospital data and administrative health data in Canada, clinical data from the United Kingdom and administrative health data from the Netherlands.

Mira Zuidgeest works as Associate Professor at the University Medical Center Utrecht. She is trained as pharmacist and epidemiologist, with a PhD in pharmacoepidemiology on paediatric asthma. Her current work focuses on clinical trial innovation, including the interaction between methodology and operations, how RWE can be generated through interventional research and the effects of trial approaches on diversity of participants in clinical trials. As academic lead for the IMI Trials@Home project, she researches possibilities of centring trials around patients rather than clinical sites (Decentralised Clinical Trial approaches). She is board member of the GetReal Institute and led the development of a decision-support tool for randomised clinical trials integrated into clinical practice.