Research facilities

• For more than 25 years, the department has run the GLOBE cohort study, which is the only Dutch cohort study specifically designed to understand the mechanisms and pathways of health inequalities in the Netherlands;
• The department has created a harmonized dataset on mortality and determinants in 28 European countries. This dataset has been a rich source for many projects over the past 20 years, often through EU grants, on international trends in health inequalities and the influence of social and physical factors on these health inequalities;
• The department is PI of the NELSON trial of 16,000 high-risk individuals, spanning a 15-year time frame;
• The department participates in the management team of Generation R’s core facility, and Social Epidemiology and Youth Health Care have several PhD projects within Generation R and Generation Next;
• The web-based microsimulation model MISCAN on the development of several cancers, cardiovascular diseases, and some children’s diseases in the population is used by various research groups around the world, most prominently to evaluate national screening programmes on breast, cervical, colorectal, oesophageal lung, and prostate cancer.
• We lead academic collaborative centres in public health, youth health care, and palliative care, whereby researchers, professionals and policy makers in health care organizations and local communities work together to improve prevention and health care practice (‘research that matters’).