Gerard van den Berg appointed as member of the Social Sciences Council of the KNAW

The board of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) has appointed professor Gerard van den Berg as Member of the Dutch Social Sciences Council (SWR).

This council provides advice and makes proposals for the advancement of social sciences. It organizes plenary conferences and meetings of social scientists and humanities scholars and it initiates and stimulates collaborations between individual researchers and institutions. The SWR also acts as representative of social sciences research in the Netherlands and abroad, and contributes to peer reviewing of KNAW advisory reports.

Fields covered by the council include anthropology, communication sciences, business administration, demography, economics, pedagogics, geography, political sciences, psychology, sociology and the social-science aspects of health sciences, law and history.

About Gerard van den Berg

Gerard van den Berg is professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business and the Department of Epidemiology of the University Medical Center Groningen. Most of his research is in the fields of econometrics, labor economics, demography, epidemiology and health, in particular regarding effects of the economy on health and the effects of health on economic outcomes. He has made major contributions to the analysis of unemployment durations and the study of the long-run effects of conditions very early in life (economic conditions, nutrition, stress exposure, and so on) on cognition, health and economic productivity later in life.

In 2020 Van den Berg joined the University of Groningen. Before that, he held positions in Amsterdam, Mannheim, Bristol and Princeton. In 2009 he received the Alexander von Humboldt Prize, as the first economist and social scientist to have won this prize. He is Fellow of the Econometric Society since 2013 and Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences.