Experts COVID-19 related research
This page provides an overview of researchers at the UU and the UMCU who are willing to commit their expertise in COVID-19 related research.
Do you need help finding the right expert? Feel free to contact us.
Prof. dr. Alexandre Bonvin (Science, Chemistry) | We are developing HADDOCK as platform to model biomolecular complexes. It is already used for example to screen approved drugs against the protease. So we can provide 3D structure modelling expertise. See recent results. |
Dr. Bas Dutilh (Science, Biology) | The UU Metagenomics Group focuses on analysis of metagenome datasets with a focus on understanding the interactions and evolution of organisms including microbes, viruses, and their hosts. We develop innovative data analysis methods and apply them to study different biomes and systems. We use machine learning tools for e.g. discovery of viruses and bacteriophages, predict virus-host interactions, and understand metabolic processes in the microbiome. |
Prof. dr. Rob Willems (UMCU, Medical Microbiology) | Biologist. Metagenomics. Is currently initiating microbiomics research togerher with drs Marcel de Zoete and Fernanda Paganelli, to study the role of the airway microbiome in disease outcome in Covid patients. |
Dr. Fernanda Paganelli (UMCU, Medical Microbiology) | Biologist. microbiome. Together with Rob Willems and Marcel de Zoete is currently study the whole of the respiratory microbiome on the disease severity of Covid patients. |
Dr. Marcel de Zoete (UMCU, Medical Microbiology) | (Micro)biologist, microbiota, host-immune interactions. Microbiota-virus-immune interactions. Is currently, together with Rob Willems and Fernanda Paganelli conducting a study examining the role of the respiratory microbiome on the disease severity of Covid patients. |
Dr. Helen Leavis (UMCU, Immunology) | Internist-clinical immunologist. Recruiting patients in anti-inflammatory COVID-19 studies (collaboration Marc Bonten/Lennie Derde) and off-label proof of concept treatment (including kallikrein pathway, collaboration Roger Schutgens), involved in microbiome studies (collaboration Rob Willems and Fernanda Paganelli) and biomarker/pathofysiological studies (collaboration Stefan Nierkens and Femke van WIjk) for severe COVID-19. |
Dr. Monique Nijhuis (UMCU, Medical Microbiology) | Biologist. Virology, virus-host interactions (research focusses on HIV), viral culture of BSL3 organisms including HIV and SARS-CoV-2. Viral characterisation, quantification and drug screens and sensitivity assessments. |
Dr. Anne Wensing (UMCU, Medical Microbiology) | Medical virologist. Is responsible for the UMCU’s employee COVID testing policies. Her research thus far has focused on HIV, but will likely include COVID from now onwards. Clinical virology, viral diagnostics and viral characterisation. |
Prof. dr. Debbie van Baarle (RIVM, UMCU, Translational Immunology) | Immunologist. Currently conducting COVID serosurveys (RIVM PIENTER study) and household transmission surveys. |
Dr. Stefan Nierkens (UMCU, Translational Immunology) | Immunologist. The UMCU Laboratory for Translational Immunology (LTI) is involved in several COVID initiatives from an immunology perspective. Stefan can tell you more. |
Prof. dr. Aletta Kraneveld (Science, Pharmacology) | Immunopharmacologist. Together with Alejandro Lopez-Rincon studying using machine learn/feature reduction on complete viral sequencing data and mRNA datasets for: 1. Specific primer design for accurate detection of SARS-CoV-2; 2. Identification of SARS-CoV-2 mutation that potentially differentiated between asymptomatic and symptomatic cases; 3. Re-analyzing and immunological interpretation of mRNA datasets of COVID-19 patients. |
Dr. Alejandro Lopez-Rincon (Pharmacology) | Bioinformatics, mathematical modeling. Deep/Machine learning applied to specifically identify/classify SARS-CoV-2 sequences in cDNA. Feature reduction to find most interesting genes affected by Covid-19 ( in progress) and primer desing. Analysis of genomic variation within cDNA sequences of SARS-CoV-2. More info: http://dx.doi.org/10.2471/BLT.20.261842 and http://dx.doi.org/10.2471/BLT.20.258889. Note: If you have the sequencing of the virus, and any clinical information of the patient please contact me. |
Dr. Marc Teunis (Innovative Testing in Life Sciences and Chemistry) | Programming, predictive modelling, reproducible workflows, Docker, visualizations, text mining. Mining a corpus for meaningfull information to adress scienctific questions. |
Prof. dr. Janneke van de Wijgert (UMCU, Julius Center) | Translational infectious disease physician-epidemiologist. Experienced in a wide range of infectious disease research, including clinical trials of treatments and prevention interventions, diagnostic accuracy studies, and etiological studies. Often collaborates with laboratory scientists and bioinformaticians, and incorporates metagenomics, proteomics, and immunological data into clinical epidemiological models. Currently involved in a wide range of COVID projects. |
Dr. Daniel Oberski (UU and UMCU, Julius Center) | Joint appointment UMCU/UU data science. Relevant activities: UU SIG's Machine Learning; UMCU Corona app team for scientific use; UMCU ADAM lead data scientist (>March ' 20); UMCU strategic theme circulatory health quartermaster data science. Methodological expertise: latent variable models, measurement error, multi-source data integration, survey methodology (e.g. study design, sampling, bias corrections and weighting). |
Prof. dr. Mirjam Kretzschmar (UMCU, Julius Center) | Mathematical modeling of: infectious disease dynamics, spread of disease, forecasting and predictions of the effect of interventions. Her and Martin Bootsma’s groups are currently modeling several aspects of the COVID epidemic, including various lock-down exit strategies. |
Dr. Martin Bootsma (UMCU, Julius Center) | Mathematical modeling of: infectious disease dynamics, spread of disease, forecasting and predictions of the effect of interventions. |
Prof. dr. Marc Bonten (UMCU, Medical Microbiology and Julius Center) | Medical microbiologist, head of the UMCU Department of Medical Microbiology and the Infection Epidemiology programme in the Julius Center. Is a member of the national and UMCU COVID outbreak management teams and is involved in a wide range of COVID research. |
Dr. Patricia Bruijning-Verhagen (UMCU, Julius Center) | Pediatrician and Associate Professor in infectious Diseases Epidemiology at the Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care of the UMC Utrecht. Her epidemiological research focuses on characterizing and quantifying clinical disease and transmission of vaccine preventable and emerging infections to guide clinical and public health policies. She has a specific interest in the role of children in transmitting infectious diseases including COVID-19. She is currently leading two large scale community transmission studies on COVID-19 funded by ZonMw and the European Commission. |
Prof. dr. Folkert Asselbergs | Coordinator The CAPACITY COVID Registry: sharing knowledge on cardiovascular complications in COVID-19 patients. COVID-19 patients with cardiovascular problems are an extremely vulnerable population. To give these patients the best possible care during this crisis and to be prepared for future outbreaks, we need to know more about these patients and the best practices for treating them. Therefore DCVA partners launched the CAPACITY COVID Registry: www.capacity-covid.eu. Please contact us if you want to contribute to this global initiative. |
Prof. dr. Miriam Sturkenboom (UMCU, Julius Center) | Pharmacoepidemiologist, using big data mining, pooling and analysis to learn about the use and effects of drugs and vaccines after marketing. Her COVID work includes a collaboration with the European Medicines Agency to document the effects of COVID in pregnancy, and to monitor future COVID vaccines (the latter not yet funded). |
Prof. dr. Frans Rutten (UMCU, Julius Center) | General Practitioner and general practice medicine researcher. Is currently coordinating national and regional initiatives related to COVID patients in general practice, including relationships between COVID and cardiovascular disease, and the effects of COVID and the lockdown on non-COVID morbidity and mortality. |
Prof. dr. Theo Verheij (UMCU, Julius Center) | General Practitioner and general practice medicine researcher, with a focus on infectious diseases. Is involved in COVID studies in general practice networks. |
Dr. ir. Joris Jaspers (UMCU, Medical Technology and Clinical Physics) | The safe and efficient development and clinical introduction of devices, supporting and protecting healthcare professionals in providing care to Covid patients. Or device for conventional healthcare, preventing the health care workers for being infected. With the knowledge of our research teams of product development and related regulations we can contribute in medical device related research. |
Prof. dr. Roel Vermeulen (Exposome Hub) | Interactions between environmental (Exposome) factors and COVID infection rates and co-morbidities. We are actively implementing COVID surveys (online, app based) within prospective population (biobank) studies in The Netherlands. We furthermore can provide information on environmental, lifestyle factors in relation to infection rates. We can offer our OMIC pipelines for biological analyses among which metabolomic analyses. |
Prof. dr. Jason Frank (Mathematical Institute) | Models for prediction and control of infections (SIR), incorporation of data in dynamic/predictive models (data assimilation and model parameter estimation), spatial modelling of infections. Possibly, computational modelling at other scales, e.g. molecular modelling. |
Prof. dr. Yannis Velegrakis (Information and computing sciences) | Modeling highly dynamic situations through graphs, by integrating data from different sources, and ensuring the collected information is of high quality. Support with (1) data quality, (2) Integration of data from highly heterogeneous sources, (3) graph management and evolving data, (4) data intensive systems, (5) exemplar queries. |
Prof. dr. Albert Salah (Information and computing sciences) | Computer analysis of human behaviour, social and affective computing. Recent publication about how mobile phone data can guide government and public health authorities in determining the best course of action to control the COVID-19 pandemic and in assessing the effectiveness of control measures such as physical distancing. |
Dr. Egon van den Broek (Information and computing sciences) | Empirical AI, human-centered computing, data science, statistics, research methods, data-driven mathematical epidemiology. |
Drs. Alexander Melchior (Information and computing sciences) | We have set up a new collaboration that has developed am Agent-Based social simulation on the Corona Crisis, ASSOCC. This simulation explores the complex interplay between epidemic, social and economic measures and their effects. Measures and policies can be custom made, implemented and experimented with to analyze their effects in the broader context of a society. See We have set up a new collaboration that has developed am Agent-Based social simulation on the Corona Crisis, ASSOCC. This simulation explores the complex interplay between epidemic, social and economic measures and their effects. Measures and policies can be custom made, implemented and experimented with to analyze their effects in the broader context of a society. See https://simassocc.org for more information. |
Prof. dr. René Eijkemans (UMCU, Julius Center) | Machine learning, biostatistics |
Prof. dr. Peter van der Heijden (Methodology and Statistics) | Population size estimation |
Prof. dr. Rens van de Schoot (Methodology and Statistics) | We developed Open Source software, ASReview, which automatically collects data (COVID-19 related papers via the CORD19 database) and uses artificial intelligence for screening for relevant papers while maintaining the high standards of systematic overviews. If you need help with your systematic search, you can contact the ASReview team. |
Dr. Daniel Oberski (UU and UMCU, Julius Center) | Joint appointment UMCU/UU data science. Relevant activities: UU SIG's Machine Learning; UMCU Corona app team for scientific use; UMCU ADAM lead data scientist (>March ' 20); UMCU strategic theme circulatory health quartermaster data science. Methodological expertise: latent variable models, measurement error, multi-source data integration, survey methodology (e.g. study design, sampling, bias corrections and weighting). |
Dr. Peter Lugtig (Methodology and Statistics) | Mobile apps, data collection, geo-tracking, survey methodology, sampling, designing a study, conducting fieldwork. |
Dr. Gerko Vink (Methodology and Statistics) | Incomplete data theory, causal inference, data wrangling, statistical learning, missing data problems and causal estimation. |
Dr. Caspar van Lissa (Methodology and Statistics) | Data wrangling, machine learning, r programming. I have curated a database of country level secondary data and coordinate a team for Data science Against Corona. See https://github.com/cjvanlissa/covod19_metadata |
Dr. Matthieu Brinkhuis (Information and computing sciences) | Data Analysis; Psychometrics; Measurement; Learning Analytics |
Ir. Jonathan de Bruin | Research engineer, work package lead Open Software of the Open Science Programme. Initiator and lead of CoronaWatchNL, |
dr. Lucie White | Philosopher, has published on the ethics of digital contact tracing, lockdowns, epidemiological modelling, and vaccination. |
Prof. dr. Arnout van de Rijt (Sociology) | Social network analysis of Covid-19 post-lockdown policies. Agent-based modeling. |
Dr. Rense Corten (Sociology) | Questions related to social social networks/social cohesion, trust, and collective action, in particular in relation to online interaction/Computer-mediated communication. |
Dr. Tobias Stark (Sociology) | I study social networks and how attitudes are transmitted within them. This could be extended to spread of disease and social distancing. I also study racism and could imagine research on the consequences of the crisis and measures such as social distancing on intergroup relations. |
Dr. Anae Sobhani (Human Geography and Planning) | Activity participations, time-use, travel behaviour, mental health, decision sciences, big data, text mining, deep learning. |
Prof Dr Derek Karssenberg | Spatial simulation modelling, high-performance geocomputation, human environmental exposure assessment, spatial epidemiology. Spatiotemporal data analysis (statistical & machine learning), spatial simulation modelling (on HPC clusters). See more on https://www.gghdc.nl/ and https://www.computationalgeography.org |
Dr. Chris Janssen (Experimental Psychology) | My research agenda is at the intersection of experimental psychology, human computer interaction, and artificial intelligence (especially: cognitive modeling). I would be interested in contributing to research projects where these insights are useful. Beyond the medical context, my past work has looked at human-automation interaction, multitasking, and distraction. This might also be relevant for projects that look at the future of work and (the efficiency of) working from home (e.g., impact of interruptions). |