Vera Peters

Vera Peters is a medical student at the University of Groningen. After graduating from her bachelor degree in Medicine in July 2015, she is currently working on her master’s degree. In her last bachelor year of medical school (February 2015), Vera has started doing research in the field of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), emphasizing on the effect of diet on disease etiology, activity and treatment.

She has developed an extensive questionnaire about changes in habitual diet, to map out the complete diet of IBD patients. This to identify possible risk and protective factors in the diet for the development and treatment of IBD. During a 6-month scientific internship, Vera has studied and compared differences in diet between IBD cases and LifeLines controls, also in the context of identifying possible risk and protective factors. This work is currently being written for submission to a peer reviewed journal.

After this internship, she continued working on clarifying the relation between diet and IBD, including optimizing the developed questionnaire, transformation of this questionnaire in a web-based version and exploring the implementation of this questionnaire in the UR-IBD cohort within the UMCG.

Besides, Vera is currently performing systematic review on the effect of diet on the risk and course of IBD, while considering confounding effects, other societal factors and from historic perspective. In a different project, Vera collaborates with a large consortium to study the effect of diet on microbiome, and their interaction on the risk of IBD.

She is very excited about her projects and intends to apply for the University of Groningen MD/PhD program in the near future, to continue her research while finishing medical school.