Our department of public health has reached the respectable age of 50. We were in excellent company 50 years ago to start our activities: Sesame street was introduced on TV, Internet was born, and the battery-operated smoke detector was invented. These events have shaped our daily lives, as we have shaped research and education in public health in the Netherlands and abroad.
Today, we celebrate our department with the same spirit as the new-born department 50 years ago. In our research we rely heavily on quantitative methods to identify important risk factors for population health, and we use innovative methods to evaluate the successes and failures of prevention and health care strategies. This is reflected in the theme of our scientific symposium: what works?
From our start we valued research with societal impact, since we know the overriding importance of environmental factors for population health. It is in the capillaries of our organisation to closely interacted with societal partners, in order to ensure that we do research that matters. In our public event we investigate with citizens from Rotterdam how we can create a healthy social and physical environment.
Knowledge can only be of use when it is shared with everyone. Hence, we organise several workshops for PhD students and postdocs on statistical methods to evaluate the effectiveness of public health interventions in observational data.
I invite you all to participate in our events. I foresee an inspiring future for public health!
Alex Burdorf
Head of the department