Ronald Stolk (Head of Department)

Professor of Clinical Epidemiology

Head of Department

Professor Ronald Stolk (Nov 1963), head of the Department of Epidemiology, is an internationally established researcher in clinical epidemiology. Over the last years, his research focuses on life course epidemiology approaches of chronic diseases, based on cohort studies and gene-environment interactions. Life Course Epidemiology is a central aspect of the “Healthy Ageing” theme of the University Medical Center Groningen.

He got his medical training in Rotterdam and was subsequently trained in epidemiology at the universities of Rotterdam, Utrecht and Sydney (Australia). He has been involved in many different studies, ranging from large population based studies to randomized clinical trials with invasive clinical measurements.

His background is in the epidemiology of diabetes and overweight. Current research in this area are on the role of fat distribution and obesity in the development of chronic diseases, notably the modification of risk by body fat.

 

Cohort studies (also referred to as biobanks) are the basis of Life Course Epidemiology, the principle study design to investigate Healthy Ageing. Since ageing starts at conception, research on healthy ageing should include the entire lifespan, and not limited to older individuals. Over the last years, professor Stolk has become increasingly involved in the infrastructure for cohort studies at local, national and international level. These biobanks include both population based studies (LifeLines, GECKO, PIAMA, BioSHaRE) as well as clinical follow-up projects (PSI, Mondriaan). Apart from infrastructure, he is actively involved in the harmonization of data from different cohort studies, including cataloguing. Harmonization allows pooling of data from different studies, required to investigate complex interaction of multiple genetic and/or lifestyle factors. Knowledge on these combined risk factors will improve Personalized Medicine and Personalized Prevention.

He is Chief Scientific Officer of the LifeLines project, a three-generations longitudinal population-based study to investigate risk factors of multifactorial diseases and its modifiers (ultimately n=165.000). Through LifeLines the UMCG is involved in several life course epidemiology projects, both national and international.

LifeLines is one of the three partners in the Dutch Biobank Hub, together with BBMRI-NL and PSI. Professor Stolk is board member of PSI (String of Pearls Initiative, a series of disease-based cohorts in all Dutch UMC’s) and member of the steering committee of BBMRI-NL . Moreover, he is principal investigator of Mondriaan (a national project to provide and standardize data from clinical care for scientific research) and board member of the HAPS project (Healthy Ageing, Population and Society; a multidisciplinary research project on healthy ageing in society).

Professor Stolk is coordinator of a landmark European-Canadian collaborative project on standardization and harmonization of biobank studies: BioSHaRE (funded by FP7). The European studies are embedded within BBMRI (an European research infrastructure of population and clinical biobanks); the main Canadian collaboration is Maelstrom Research , which is part of the Public Population Project in Genomics and Society project (P3G).

Moreover, he is principal investigator of the GECKO Drenthe Study , a birth cohort focusing on metabolic programming (n=3000). He is also involved withtwo other Groningen population studies: TRAILS and Prevend. Finally, he is associate editor of the European Journal of Epidemiology, and past president of the European Diabetes Epidemiology Group (EDEG). He has supervised over 35 PhD projects (16 currently running) and published more than 200 papers in international peer-reviewed journals.

 

During his whole professional career professor Stolk has been involved with teaching epidemiology to both undergraduate and postgraduate students. He is program director of the Research Master program “Clinical and Psychosocial Epidemiology”, as well as certified epidemiology instructor on behalf of the Netherlands Epidemiological Society .

 

A selection of relevant recent publications:

· Fortier I, Doiron D, Little J, Ferretti V, L'heureux F, Stolk RP, Knoppers BM, Hudson TJ, Burton PR; on behalf of the International Harmonization Initiative. Is rigorous retrospective harmonization possible? Application of the DataSHaPER approach across 53 large studies. Int J Epidemiol. 2011; 40: 1314-28.

· Jansen H, Huiting HG, Scholtens S, Sauer PJ, Stolk RP. HbA1c in nondiabetic Dutch infants aged 8-12 months: the GECKO-Drenthe birth cohort study. Diabetes Care. 2011;34:403-5.

· Chambers JC, Zhang W, …, Stolk RP, … Elliott P, Kooner JS. Genome-wide association study identifies loci influencing concentrations of liver enzymes in plasma. Nat Genet 2011; 43: 1131-8.

· Qin L, Corpeleijn E, Jiang C, Thomas GN, Schooling CM, Zhang W, Cheng KK, Leung GM, Stolk RP, Lam TH. Physical activity, adiposity and diabetes risk in middle-aged and older Chinese population: The Guangzhou Biobank cohort study. Diabetes Care 2010; 33: 2342-8.

· Lucia Rolfe E de, Sleigh A, Finucane FM, Brage S, Stolk RP, Cooper C, Sharp SJ, Wareham NJ, Ong K. Ultrasound measurements of visceral and subcutaneous abdominal thickness to predict abdominal adiposity among older men and women. Obesity 2010; 18: 625-31.

· Stolk RP, Hutter I, Wittek RP. Population ageing research: a family of disciplines. Eur J Epidemiol. 2009;24:715-8.

· Stolk RP, Rosmalen JGM, Postma DS, Boer RA de, Navis G, Slaets JPJ, Ormel J, Wolffenbuttel BHR. Universal risk factors for multifactorial diseases - LifeLines: a three-generation population-based study. Eur J Epidemiol 2008; 23: 67-74.