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moving to Graz in 2015, she worked almost 15 years at the Department of Public and Occupational Health at the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She has a Master Degree in Medical Biology, and a post-doctorate degree in Epidemiology.
Since 2000, she works in physical activity research, with a main focus on pregnancy. This concerns evaluation of interventions for the promotion of physical activity in pregnancy, addressing measurement issues in pregnancy, and getting more insight into health effects of physical activity in pregnancy.
She conducted multiple trials for the prevention of excessive gestational weight gain and/or gestational diabetes; among those, the EU funded study Vitamin D And Lifestyle Intervention for Gestational Diabetes Mellitus (GDM) Prevention (DALI). She was involved in the development of Dutch national guidelines for occupational physicians on pregnancy and postpartum, member of the IOC expert group “Exercise and pregnancy in recreational and elite athletes 2016/2017”. Starting April 2021, she will coordinate the I-PREGNO study, a European study on the prevention of unhealthy weight gain in families in pregnancy and postpartum using a mHealth-enhanced intervention. She published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, and has a H-Index of 42 (Web of Science)