Speakers

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”.

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.

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.

Ionica Smeets is a science journalist, mathematician and professor of science communication at Leiden University. She wants to improve the interaction between science and society by studying how science communication works. What goes wrong when those groups communicate with each other? And what can scientists do to improve this process? The general public knows her for her popular science columns, blogs, books and television work. She has also written several books on science communication. She for example writes columns for a prominent Dutch national newspaper, de Volkskrant. She also makes a photo comic for New Scientist with Ype Driessen. She has made various TV programs and has been presenting the Dutch National Science Quiz since 2015.

Smeets has a background in mathematics that she obtained with a cum laude degree at TU Delft. She then obtained her PhD in number theory at Leiden University.

Will Tiemeijer studeerde Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde aan de Universiteit van Utrecht. In 2006 promoveerde hij (cum laude) aan de Universiteit van Tilburg op het proefschrift Het geheim van de burger: over staat en opinieonderzoek. Sinds 2007 werkt hij bij de Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid, waar hij zich heeft gespecialiseerd in onderwerpen op het snijvlak van psychologie, filosofie en politiek.

Sinds 2019 is hij tevens bijzonder hoogleraar Gedragswetenschappen en Beleid aan de Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam. Centraal in die leerstoel staat de vraag hoe psychologische kennis en inzichten kunnen bijdragen aan en beter begrip van maatschappelijke problemen in het algemeen en overheidsbeleid in het bijzonder. In september 2022 verscheen zijn bij Cambridge University Press zijn meest recente boek: Self-Control. Individual Differences and What They Mean for Personal Responsibility and Public Policy.