The pandemic of obesity and related diseases is among the most pressing problems in public health. Interventions to improve diet quality at an individual level are often ineffective in the long run, since they disregard the contextual drivers, such as our food environment, that shape dietary behaviors. Therefore, the aim of this PhD project is to assess the combined effectiveness of various policy interventions targeting the food environment on diet quality to prevent obesity and related disease risks. This assessment will be done by building, calibrating, validating, and applying a spatial agent-based model.

• prof. dr. Derek Karssenberg
• dr. Judith Verstegen
• Chiara Richardt MSc

• Joreintje Mackenbach (Amsterdam UMC)
• Joline Beulens (Amsterdam UMC)

The environment we live in has a dominant impact on our health. It explains an estimated 70% of the chronic disease
burden. Since most aspects of our environment are modifiable, this provides a huge potential for disease prevention.
Leading scientists in Europe and the USA have formalised this perspective as the Exposome concept. Derived from
the term exposure, the Exposome is the characterisation of the non-genetic drivers of health and disease. Interacting
with the genome, it defines individual health. The Exposome comprises aspects of the Built environment
(characteristics of where we live); the Social environment (with whom we interact, social networks and income); the
Physico-Chemical environment (chemical substances we are exposed to) and the Lifestyle/Food environment (what
we eat, how much we exercise). Studying the Exposome requires consideration of:
• The multitude of interrelated individual exposures: the specific external Exposome;
• The wider behavioural and social context in which these exposures occur: the general external Exposome; and
• Their impact inside the human body: the internal Exposome.

• dr. T.S. (Tabea) Sonnenschein

With this project we want to lay the theoretical as well as computational foundations for a Semantic Web based GIS infrastructure. This allows analysts to search for appropriate data and tools on the Web, simply by formulating an analytical question, and to load the required resources to answer this question directly from the web into a GIS.

https://questionbasedanalysis.com/