Specialization
Focus of research
Contact information
E-mail address: j.lakerveld@amsterdamumc.nl
Profile
I am Associate Professor at Amsterdam UMC, Department of Epidemiology and Data Science, and Vice-Director of the Amsterdam Public Health research institute (APH). Within APH, my focus areas include sustainability, societal impact and valorisation, and diversity, equity and inclusion. I also lead the Upstream Team, a research group dedicated to understanding how living environments shape lifestyle behaviours and chronic disease risk.
My research focuses on the influence of environmental factors on lifestyle behaviours and related health outcomes, and on how these can be addressed through upstream, system-level approaches, including policy interventions. Using rich individual- and environmental-level data from the Netherlands and across Europe, including geospatial and exposome data, my team applies innovative epidemiological and data-science methods to understand the drivers of health inequalities and identify opportunities for prevention.
I obtained my PhD in 2011 with the thesis Efforts to prevent diabetes and cardiovascular diseases in primary care, following earlier studies in physiotherapy and public health research at Utrecht University and VU University Amsterdam.
I have coordinated or co-led several large international and national research collaborations, including the EU-FP7 SPOTLIGHT project, the JPI DEDIPAC and Policy Evaluation Network (PEN), and the national Supreme Nudge trial. I currently coordinate the Horizon Europe project OBCT (Obesity: Biological, socioCultural and environmental risk Trajectories; www.obct.nl) and lead the Geohealth Cohort Consortium (GECCO; www.gecco.nl), a research infrastructure linking environmental exposures to health outcomes across large population-based cohorts.
In addition, I am a Work Package leader in several major collaborative projects, including STAGE, a Horizon Europe project on ageing and multimorbidity, MIREYA, and the Renal Heat Map project. Across these initiatives, my work centres on environmental determinants of health, geospatial exposure assessment, health inequalities and the translation of our epidemiological and geospatial research into tools and evidence that can support policy and practice.
I am Associate Editor of Obesity Facts and a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity (IJBNPA).
My long-term goal is to advance the science, societal impact and policy relevance of upstream prevention, and to contribute to creating environments that make healthy choices easier, more equitable and more sustainable.