Speakers

Sonia Boender, PhD, is a health scientist and field epidemiologist at the Risk Communications group of the Robert Koch Institute (Germany’s national public health institute).  She has demonstrated experience with infectious disease monitoring and surveillance, applied public health research and outbreak investigation on local, national and international level (incl ECDC, WHO). She is an experienced risk and science communicator. Her applied research focuses on managing the infodemic, bridging epidemiology, and communication.

Elburg van Boetzelaer is an epidemiologist/public health practitioner. After obtaining an Msc in Criminology, she worked for a couple of years with different NGOs on child rights in Indonesia and Thailand. Subsequently she worked as a legal assistant to the judges of the UN tribunal for the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Realizing that it was time for a career switch to follow her public health heart, she went back to school to pursue an MPH at Columbia University. In the following years, Elburg worked as a field epidemiologist with different NGOs including the International Rescue Committee (IRC, in DRC and South Sudan) and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Jordan, Iraq, Bangladesh).

Since two years, she is working with MSF as an Epidemiology Advisor, providing support to country teams on surveillance, outbreak preparedness and response and operational research. Elburg sits on different WHO expert groups and on the board of Applied Epi (home of the EpiRHandbook). In addition to her daily work with MSF, Elburg is pursuing an PhD with UMC Utrecht on the topic of inclusion of elderly people in the co-design of health programs/interventions in humanitarian emergencies.

Mark Burgman is Professor of Risk Analysis and Environmental Policy at Imperial College London. Previously, he was Head of the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College, following positions as Head of Department of Biosciences, Director of the Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis and the Adrienne Clarke Chair of Botany at the University of Melbourne. He has worked on expert judgement, decision analysis, conservation biology and risk assessment in a broad range of settings including marine fisheries, forestry, irrigation, electrical power utilities, mining, and national park planning. He has worked closely with government and industry in Australia, the USA and the UK, joining the University of Melbourne in 1990, moving to Imperial in 2017. He has been the principal investigator on research totaling more than $30M.  He has published seven authored books and over 300 research papers and book chapters. His most recent book ‘Trusting judgements’ appeared through Cambridge University Press in 2015. He was elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 2006.

Stijntje Dijk, a medical doctor and PhD candidate from Erasmus University Rotterdam, focuses her research on optimizing decision making in healthcare, education, and research. Her research is multifaceted, including performing decision analyses, investigating the value of information of emerging COVID-19 therapies, examining the effect of clinical decision support systems for diagnostic imaging, and exploring the cost-effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions for health professions students. Her educational background includes an MSc in Medicine, an MSc in Health Economics, Policy and Law, and an MSc in Health Sciences.

Trish Greenhalgh is Professor of Primary Care Health Sciences and Fellow of Green Templeton College at the University of Oxford. She studied Medical, Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge and Clinical Medicine at Oxford before training first as a diabetologist and later as an academic general practitioner. She has a doctorate in diabetes care and an MBA in Higher Education Management. She leads a programme of research at the interface between the social sciences and medicine, working across primary and secondary care.

Her work seeks to celebrate and retain the traditional and the humanistic aspects of medicine and healthcare while also embracing the exceptional opportunities of contemporary science and technology to improve health outcomes and relieve suffering. Three particular interests are the health needs and illness narratives of minority and disadvantaged groups; the introduction of technology-based innovations in healthcare; and the complex links (philosophical and empirical) between research, policy and practice.  She has brought this interdisciplinary perspective to bear on the research response to the Covid-19 pandemic, looking at diverse themes including clinical assessment of the deteriorating patient by phone and video, the science and anthropology of face coverings, and policy decision-making in conditions of uncertainty. She is a member of Independent SAGE, an interdisciplinary academic team established to provide independent advice on the pandemic direct to the lay public.

Trish is the author of over 400 peer-reviewed publications and 16 textbooks.  She was awarded the OBE for Services to Medicine by Her Majesty the Queen in 2001 and made a Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences in 2014. She is also a Fellow of the UK Royal College of Physicians, Royal College of General Practitioners, Faculty of Clinical Informatics and Faculty of Public Health. In 2021, she was elected to the  Fellowship of United States National Academy of Medicine for “major contributions to the study of innovation and knowledge translation and work to raise the profile of qualitative social sciences”. She  received a honorary doctorate from the Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2021.

Susan van den Hof is an epidemiologist in the field of infectious disease surveillance and research, both in the Netherlands and in resource limited settings. She heads the Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Surveillance at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM).

Mariëtte Hooiveld is an epidemiologist with expertise on (infectious) diseases in primary care. She leads the real-time surveillance system of Nivel Primary Care Database (Nivel PCD), aiming at signaling expected and unexpected trends in health problems presented in primary care. Mariëtte collaborates in European studies on surveillance and vaccine effectiveness and is project leader of the national monitor of influenza and pneumococcal vaccine uptake. She is part-time seconded to the national institute for public health and the environment (RIVM), Centre for Infectious Diseases Epidemiology and Surveillance.

Myriam Hunink, MD, PhD, completed a BSc in applied mathematics, an MD degree, and a PhD in health decision sciences. She trained as a radiologist in Amsterdam (VUMC), did sub-specialty training in interventional and cardiovascular radiology in Boston (BWH/Harvard), and did a research fellowship at Harvard (HSPH/BWH/HMS). Currently she is Professor of Clinical Epidemiology & Radiology and Director of the Netherlands Institute for Health Sciences (NIHES), at the Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In addition, she is Adjunct Professor of Health Decision Sciences at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, Boston.

Jeremy Labrecque is assistant professor of epidemiology and leader of the Causal Inference at Erasmus MC. His work includes the application of causal inference to a wide range of topics including Mendelian randomization, target trial emulation and decision science. More broadly he is interested in how to use causal inference to ask better questions and get better answers from imperfect data. He is a recent recipient of a VENI award which aims to incorporate causal bias analysis into decision-making processes.

Carl Moons is Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care, UMC Utrecht, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands, and is Director of Research of the Julius Center.

Tina Nane is an Assistant Professor of Applied Probability at Delft University of Technology. Tina has a PhD in Statistics and a cum laude MSc in Risk and Environmental Modelling from TU Delft. Her current research primarily focuses on uncertainty quantification and analysis, both data-driven and by employing expert opinion. The structured expert judgement (SEJ) applications using Classical Model span over a variety of areas, including source attribution of food and waterborne illnesses in the U.S. (for CDC) and Africa, burden of disease of chemical contaminants, and dike failure assessments in The Netherlands. Tina has designed and is the main lecturer of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) “Decision making under uncertainty: an introduction to structured expert judgement”, and of an online course for professionals, “Decision analysis under uncertainty”. She has developed and taught courses on SEJ for the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).  On campus, Tina is teaching courses on decision theory and expert judgement.

Daniel holds the chair of Data Science in Healthcare jointly at the University Medical Center Utrecht (UMCU), department of Data Science & Biostatistics; and at Utrecht University, Department of Methodology & Statistics. He works on developing novel methods useful in the health and social sciences, usually by combining ideas from different areas of statistics with ideas in the field of machine learning. He also works on applications across various disciplines, including cardiology, rheumatology, psychology, economics, transportation, environmental epidemiology, electrophysiology, and forest ecology. Daniel is coordinator of the Social Data Science team at ODISSEI – the Dutch national infrastructure for the social sciences – and chief methodologist at UMCU’s Digital Health program.

Peter van Ooijen is Associate professor of radiation oncology, affiliated as Machine Learning Lab Coordinator and expert Machine Learning at the Data Science Center in Health (DASH), and President of the European Society of Medical Informatics.

Lilian Peters PhD works as an assistant professor/epidemiologist B at the Department of Primary and Longterm Care/Midwifery Science at the University Medical Center Groningen.

Ionica Smeets is a professor of science communication at Leiden University and a science journalist with a PhD in mathematics. Her mission is to improve the interaction between science and society by studying how science communication works. What is going wrong when those groups communicate with each other? And what can scientists do to improve this process?

In her talk Smeets will focus on how to communicate about uncertainty to a broader public. Does it help to use words in stead of numbers? Are research results less likely to be picked up by the media if you also mention the limitations and caveats of your work? Who is responsible for making sure the nuances and uncertainties about scientific results are communicated? These and more questions will be answered during Smeets’ keynote at WEON 2023 – Embracing Uncertainty.

Will Tiemeijer studied Dutch Language and Literature at the University of Utrecht. In 2006 he obtained his doctorate (cum laude) at Tilburg University for his dissertation The secret of the citizen: about the state and public opinion research. Since 2007 he has worked at the Scientific Council for Government Policy, where he specializes in topics at the intersection of psychology, philosophy and politics. Since 2019 he is appointed professor of Behavioral Sciences and Policy at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Central to this chair is the question of how psychological knowledge and insights can contribute to a better understanding of social problems in general and government policy in particular. In September 2022, Cambridge University Press published his most recent book: Self-Control. Individual Differences and What They Mean for Personal Responsibility and Public Policy.

Alma Tostmann (PhD), is a biomedical scientist and field epidemiologist at the Radboud university medical centre. She works as deputy head of the Infection Prevention and Control Unit at the Department of Medical Microbiology. In her day-to-day work she is responsible for the surveillance of hospital infections, the detection and control of hospital outbreaks, and makes use of routinely collected microbiological and epidemiological data to continuously improve infection prevention and control. She became an experienced science communicator in the media during the COVID-19 pandemic, and enjoys spreading the love for epidemiology to colleagues, students and the general public.

Tom van den Heuvel is a Public Policy and Affairs advisor at Health-RI. He works on stakeholdermanagement, policy making and the lobby regarding secondary use of health data in the Netherlands and Europe. Together with the Ministry of Health and other national organizations, he is closely involved in designing the implementation of the European Health Data Space in the Netherlands.