first 1000 days
nutritional programming

Global public health specialist/ epidemiologist  with more  than 15 years experience in global health research and teaching, specifically epidemiology, health systems & policy and implementation research. My research is focused on estimating and reducing the disparity gap in reproductive, maternal and child health and nutrition. A particular research interest is the double burden of malnutrition and implementing interdisciplinary interventions for improving adolescent, maternal and child nutrition in poor resource settings, such as refugee settlements and urban slums.

Clinical epidemiologist (MSc) with a broad background in nutrition. Specialised in nutrition and IBD. As an assistant professor, I am working for the department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology First, I designed and coordinate two clinical research projects with a focus on the nutritional status of high risk oncological patients undergoing 1. oesophagectomy or 2. cytoreductive surgery (CRS) and Hyperthermic IntraPEritoneal Chemotherapy (HIPEC).Next, I am focussing on nutritional research for patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Based on literature, I developed an anti-inflammatory diet for patients with inflammatory bowel disease (the Groningen Anti-Inflammatory Diet: GrAID). This diet can also be used in other immune mediated inflammatory diseases. Currently, we are testing this diet in the Vita_GrAID trial. In this large RCT we investigate 1. the effect of this anti-inflammatory diet, 2. a special coated vitamin capsule a large RCT and 3. a placebo capsule in patients with Crohn's disease and their healthy household members. As a clinical epidemiologist, I support other co-workers in their research questions. Besides, I teach "Malnutrition in Hospitals" in the master module "Nutrition in Medicine" and the curriculum of medical students, and "Nutrition and IBD"in the master of Pharmaceutical and Drug Innovation. Furthermore, I am involved in writing several international guidelines on nutrition and IBD.

Lifestyle Medicine, Nutrition, Diet, Physical activity, Accelerometry, cohort studies, randomized controlled lifestyle interventions, childhood obesity, adult obesity, diabetes mellitus type 2

Inborn errors of metabolism
Neonatal screening
Hepatic glycogen storage diseases (GSD)
Medium-chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase deficiency (MCADD)
Multiple acyl-CoA dehydrogenase deficiency (MADD)

Child nutrition, Global Health, Capability Approach, Inequalities

My research involves the environmental impacts of food production and the options to reduce the impacts. It includes both the production (agriculture) as the consumption patterns (diets). The research line on sustainable food issues was initiated 25 years ago. In those times very limited number of scientists (20 globally) were interested in this subject. We developed methods to determine environmental impacts of individual food items (Kramer et all, 1999 and Gerbens Leenes & Nonhebel 2000).  A recent overview (Pure and Nemacek, 2018) showed that since then 40.000 scientific papers on this issue have been published globally using methods based on the ones we designed long ago. In the meantime this scientific knowledge have reached the public. People know what (carbon) footprints are and that food production has a large environmental impact. There is a lot of interest in society for this issue. The present nitrogen issue in the Netherlands makes that many organizations are interested/worried and I obtain many requests for interviews and talks. Besides the food issue I also pay attention to biomass production for other purposes, bioenergy, biogas and bioplastics. And of cause the competion beteen food and fuel. I teach in the Msc programm Energy and Environmental Sciences and I am guest lecturing on this subject in a large number of courses at various faculties within our university, at the University of Applied Sciences, and at other universities in The Netherlands and abroad.

Nutrition Epidemiology, Food Science, Public Health, and Lifestyle Medicine