Keynote lectures
Prof.dr. Jochen Mierau, Universiteit Groningen
Jochen Mierau (1983) is a professor of public health economics at the University of Groningen (Faculty of Economics & Business) as well as co-founder and scientific director of the Aletta Jacobs School of Public Health. He is an affiliated researcher of the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) and an extramural fellow of the Health Econometrics and Data Group of the University of York.
His research interest is at the interface between health economics, epidemiology, demography and public health. He focuses on health inequalities between and within socioeconomic groups on an individual as well as neighborhood level. While much of his research focuses on various determinants of health inequalities, he also focuses on the policy levers that may be employed to reduce health inequalities such as better data-infrastructures and more clearly assigned responsibilities.
He has set up a variety of multidisciplinary educational programs such as a summer school, a minor, a research master track, and an Executive MBA. He actively participates in various regional, national and European policy dialogues and serves as advisor for a host of government agencies.
Prof.dr. Dick Sijm, Campus Venlo
After his academic study chemistry, Dick finalised his Ph.D. thesis "Influence of Biotransformation on Bioaccumulation and Toxicity of Chlorinated Organic Compounds in Fish" in 1992. He then continued his career as assistant professor and as head of unit of environmental chemistry at the Research Institute of Toxicology (RITOX) at Utrecht University. He stayed some time in Winnipeg (Canada) and Uppsala (Sweden) to perform research. From 1993-1998 Dick was chair of the Environmental Chemistry Section of the Royal Dutch Chemical Society (KNCV).
In 1997 he moved to the National Institute of Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), where he took several positions: starting as coordinator for setting environmental quality standards, he then moved to the position of coordinator of existing substances under the Existing Substances Regulation EC/793/93. Then, he was member of the Dutch (and Luxembourg) negotiation team for the preparation of the REACH Regulation EC/1907/2006, and started as Head of Bureau REACH and head of unit, from 2005-2016. In this latter period he was alternate Dutch member of the Management Board of the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) as well as Dutch spokesman and co-chair of the OESO Joint Meeting of the Chemicals Committee and the Working Party on Chemicals, Pesticides and Biotechnology.
Since 2016, Dick is heading the unit of risk assessment at the Office of Risk Assessment & research (BuRO) at the Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Autority. Over the years he was member of or advisor to two committees of the Dutch Health Council: a) risk evaluation of substances/dioxins (1995-1996), and b) assessment framework public health in environmental policy (2015-2016). Dick acted as co-promotor to four Ph.D. student in the period 1995-1998 and has published over 100 scientific publications and over 30 scientific reports as first or second author. Dick was appointed in 2018 as extraordinary professor on ‘food safety in a sustainable economy’ at Maastricht University, and currently supervises two Ph.D. student, an assistant professor and a technician.
NUTRIM | School of Nutrition and Translational Research in Metabolism
NUTRIM aims to contribute to health maintenance and personalised medicine by unraveling lifestyle and disease-induced derangements in metabolism and by developing targeted nutritional, exercise and drug interventions. This is facilitated by a state of the art research infrastructure and close interaction between scientists, clinicians, master and PhD students.
www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/nutrim