prof. dr. ir. H.H. (Hinke) Haisma

Short biography

Hinke Haisma is adjunct professor and Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the Faculty of Spatial Sciences, Department of Demography, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. The Rosalind Franklin Fellowship is a prestigious fellowship programme of the University of Groningen. The programme is aiming to raise the presence of women at the highest levels of the institution, and female academics who aim for a career towards full professorship in a European top research university, are selected for tenure track positions, and given the chance to develop their research programme.

Research programme
Her research focusses on how the use of resources affects inequalities in child health and nutrition. Having a background in human nutrition (agricultural sciences) and a PhD in medical sciences, and further training in social sciences, her work is interdisciplinary in its nature. Her work is driven by the link between biological and demographic sciences: she combines the biological and the social context of feeding behaviour in relation to health outcomes. In 2012, she was awarded a prestigious VIDI research grant by the Dutch Research Foundation for her research on “Normative indicators of child health and nutrition – one size fits all?”. She is chair of the IUNS Task Force on Diet, Nutrition and Long-term Health.

Working experience
After completing her masters in Human Nutrition from Wageningen Agricultural University in 1992, she was assigned by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (DGIS) to work as an associate professional officer (APO) at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna (1995-1998). She coordinated technical cooperation programmes aiming to evaluate nutrition intervention programmes in developing countries (using stable isotope techniques). A second assignment was at the Universidade Federal de Pelotas in Brazil (through WHO, and the Pan-American Health Organisation), where she joined the research group of Cesar Victora at the department of social medicine from 1998-2002. In Pelotas she conducted the field work for her PhD entitled "Energy utilisation of infants in southern Brazil - Breastfeeding patterns and socio-economic status in relation to obesity". This work was a interdisciplinary collaboration between epidemiology, biology, medical sciences. Back in the Netherlands she worked at the Centre for Social Development (CMO) in Groningen, and as a sr lecturer at the Hanze University for Applied Sciences, Research Group in Health Care and Nursing, where she taught in Evidence-Based Medicine at the Nutrition and Dietetics education programme. Since 2009 she is employed at the University of Groningen.

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