Lecturers

Dr. Sibyl Anthierens is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Primary Care Medicine, Department of Interdisciplinary and Primary Care, and co-president of the University Center of Qualitative Health Research Antwerp. Currently she is also a visting academic research fellow at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford. She is a primary care sociologist specialized in researching prescribing behavior with a focus on the way in which evidence-based treatments and management strategies are used or not used in everyday practice by both patients and professionals. She is also involved in a big national projects on integrated care and is leading the implementation analysis. She has used a wide range of research methodologies, but with a particular focus on qualitative research.  Her previous research has involved both primary and secondary analysis of qualitative data and triangulation of mixed methods data. She supports several national and international PhD students on the qualitative research components of their research.

Hilde Bastiaens is a medical doctor with a degree in general practice and Public Health for children. Since 1997 she works at the Department of Primary and Interdisciplinary Care of the Antwerp University. She defended her PhD on involvement, empowerment and self-management education in primary care for people with chronic conditions in 2010. She has been involved in qualitative research since 2000 and has been a teacher and tutor in the International course on Qualitative Research organized by the Department for many years. Her topic of interests in research are  empowerment, interdisciplinary care, infant and youth care, prevention, chronic care and translational research.

Christopher Delgado-Ratto has been involved in the study of molecular epidemiology of malaria parasites since he was an undergraduate biology student in Peru. He graduated as a biologist in 2005 at the Universidad Nacional Federico Villarreal (Lima, Peru). Afterwards he worked as a research assistant in malaria-related projects at the Institute of Tropical Medicine Alexander von Humboldt (Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, Peru), with which he actively collaborates.

In 2010, as a VLIR scholar (the Flemish Interuniversity Council), he got the diploma of Master in Molecular Biology at the Free University of Brussels. Since 2012 he is a predoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp (EfGHI – in the Faculty of Medicine). Within his PhD investigation Christopher studies the population genetics and dynamics of the malaria parasite Plasmodium vivax in the Peruvian Amazon. Currently he is also engaged in other malaria-related collaborative projects with Peru, Vietnam, Congo, Uganda and Tanzania where he gives support to other PhD students on statistical data analysis, molecular epidemiology and population genetics approaches.

Christopher has been teaching the practical sessions on the use of statistical software in the last two editions of the EBQ course.

Prof. Jean-Pierre Van geertruyden is a disease control specialist. He started his career in the Navy, where he was involved in occupational health, diving medicine and disaster medicine. He worked over a decade as a clinician and a manager in several humanitarian and disease control projects in developing countries mostly in Sub Saharan Africa with „Médecins Sans Frontières”. With the World Health organization (WHO), he evaluated the performance of Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI) and more in particular organized nationwide polio eradication efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

His academic career started in 2003, at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in  Antwerp, Belgium where he conducted research on malaria and HIV research and on their interaction. He was involved in lecturing on malaria related topics, biostatistics, disaster medicine and vaccine preventable diseases. He obtained his PhD in Medical sciences at the University of Antwerp (UA) in 2007. Since 2009, he is heading the International Health Unit (IHU) at the UA. Since then, the IHU has obtained a substantial number of grants and several active international collaborations with Universities in the South. As president of the commission Internationalization, he is strongly involved in internationalization efforts both for ingoing and outgoing international students, European or further abroad and “internationalization at home”.

His main expertise lies in bio-statistical support, operational research, designing and implementing quantitative research designs and conducting clinical trials in resource poor settings.

Joost Weyler graduated at Ghent University as Medical Doctor in 1980. Since 1982, he has been working as scientific co-worker at the Department of Epidemiology and Social Medicine, University of Antwerp. In 1993 he obtained his PhD in Epidemiology with a thesis entitled: ‘Relative measures of effect in case control studies’. In 1994 Joost Weyler was nominated as ‘Lecturer’ at the Faculty of Medicine. Since 2008 he is appointed as full professor.

Joost Weyler conducts lectures in epidemiology at the University of Antwerp. Furthermore he coordinates course epidemiology in different interuniversity advanced master programs. In 1997 he was nominated as ‘visiting professor’ at Hasselt University for the ‘Masters of Science in Biostatistics’ program. He is program director of the ‘Master in Epidemiology’, organized since 2012 at the Antwerp University.

His experience concerning education in epidemiology led to his membership in different visitation comities of the Dutch – Flemish Accreditations Organisation and of the Society of Epidemiology of the Netherlands.

His scientific activities are mainly situated in the domain of cancer epidemiology, with emphasis on cancer prevention and cancer registration, and in the domain of respiratory diseases (asthma). Joost Weyler is a member of the steering committee of the ‘European Community Respiratory Health Survey’ (ECRHS), associate in the ‘European Study of Cohorts for Air Pollution Effects’ (ESCAPE), collaborator in the ‘International Study on Asthma and Allergies in Childhood’ (ISAAC) and supervisor of the cohort study ‘Prospective Study on the Influence of Perinatal Factors on the Occurrence of Asthma and Allergies’ (PIPO).

Steven Abrams (PhD) is a professor at the department of Epidemiology and Social Medicine of the University of Antwerp and a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Statistics, a division of the Interuniversity Institute for Biostatistics and statistical Bioinformatics (I-BioStat) at Hasselt University (UHasselt).

Prof. Abrams holds a bachelor degree in mathematics (2009), a master degree in statistics (Epidemiology and Public Health Methodology) (2011) and a PhD degree in statistics (2015) from Hasselt University. He has worked on modelling individual heterogeneity in the acquisition of infectious diseases using frailty models. His primary research interest is in the quantification of unobserved heterogeneity in susceptibility to infection, infectiousness upon infection and social contact behavior, sources which are all relevant for the spread of infectious diseases and the control of emerging infections. Furthermore, his research interests include the statistical analysis of (serial-) serological survey data, outbreak risk assessment in highly vaccinated populations (including but not limited to measles, mumps and rubella), development of novel statistical methodology for the estimation of epidemiological parameters with regard to malaria infection and the application and integration of survival data techniques in infectious disease epidemiology. Prof. Abrams teaches introductory topics in statistics and mathematical modeling in the Bachelor of Mathematics and Biomedical Sciences at Hasselt University, in the Bachelor of Medicine at the University of Antwerp and to master students in Biomedical Sciences at Hasselt University. He also gives advanced statistical courses and statistical consultancy training in the Master of Statistics at Hasselt University and the Master of Epidemiology at the University of Antwerp.

Giannoula Tsakitzidis is a physiotherapist who develops and coordinates interprofessional educational modules as an ambassador for the Department of Primary and Interdisciplinary Care of the faculty of medicine en health science of the University of Antwerp. She regularly gives seminars, workshops and/or consultancy on 'learning to work together in an interprofessional way' for care providers and curriculum developers of other programs. Next to that she also organises and coordinates general practitioners' internship in the basic curriculum for medicine students.

Since 2008 she works at the Centre for General Practice, she is a member of the ELIZA ( the Primary and Interdisciplinary Care Research Group) council department. She defended her PhD on ‘Learning to collaborate interprofessionally’ in 2018. Because of her experience in qualitative research for her PhD in medical sciences she is also a teacher in the International course on Qualitative Research organized by the Department for many years.

Paul Van Royen, MD, PhD, is Professor Family Medicine in the Department of Primary and Interdisciplinary Care.

After graduating as a general practitioner in 1983, he started up an inner-city practice with his wife Lieve Peremans, later on grown into a group practice. From 1987 till 1993, he was research assistant at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, department of Microbiology and STI. In 1993 he finished his PhD thesis entitled " Vaginal discharge and bacterial vaginosis in family practice" and was honoured with the Price of the Dutch College for the Study of STDs.                

His academic work is directed at teaching and research in primary care. He is coordinator of several teaching modules and programs, on undergraduate level as well as on graduate and postgraduate levels. At his department, he developed a research centre  with strong expertise qualitative research and several research lines, each developing projects, collaboration and a growing output (research of education, respiratory tract infections, diabetes, interprofessional care, palliative care and sexual health including STI and contraception). He was chair of this department from 1994 till 2012. He was/is contractant in different international projects, funded by the European Community (Forum project, Improve, TRANSFoRm). As co-chair in different South Initiatives, he stimulated the development of a stronger and more integrated primary health care in Central and South Africa, as well as in Ecuador. He is author of more than 250 articles in peer-reviewed journals and reviewer of different scientific journals. He had presentations at different international congresses. He was President of EGPRN (the European General Practice Research Network) from 2004 till 2010, the WONCA network for Primary Care research in Europe. He was also Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences from 2012 till 2018.  Since 1996 he is coordinator of the Primary Care Clinical Guidelines project.As chairman of the Advice Centre for Child Abuse and his involvement in many other local networks, he has a close contact with the broad field of primary health care.

Dr. Nele Pauwels works currently (since 2015) as Information Specialist at the Knowledge Center for Health Ghent in Belgium. After she obtained her PhD in Medical Sciences, Nele worked as staff member at the Knowledge Center of the Belgian Red Cross-Flanders (Center for Evidence-Based Practice), where she developed evidence-based guidelines and systematic reviews, according to international gold standards.

She supports researchers (on individual basis) during all stages of performing and writing a systematic review (i.e. from protocol development and registration, literature search, record selection, data extraction, assessing the risk of bias, data synthesis, writing and publication). She teaches basic and advanced searching techniques in several (bio)medical databases (such as PubMed and Embase), and reference software (such as EndNote).

Dr. Ellen Deschepper, statistician at the Biostatistics Unit of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Ghent University, provides statistical consulting and support to researchers of the faculty and the Ghent University Hospital. She graduated in 2000 as a Master of Science in Biostatistics at Hasselt University and obtained her Phd in Statistics in 2007 at Ghent University. She has over 18 years of experience in the field of biostatistics and is involved in numerous clinical studies and trials, to deliver statistical advice and services with respect to study design, sample size and power issues, statistical methodology and data analyses, interpretation and publication of results, etc... Over the years, she has taught various courses in statistics and in the practical use of statistical software packages.

Alessandro is a PhD Student in Medical Statistics at the Global Health Institute (University of Antwerp), under the supervision of Prof. Steven Abrams, Prof. Niel Hens, and Prof. Koen Peeters (Institute of Tropical Medicine). His PhD project focuses on advancing statistical methods for the estimation of relevant age/time dependent epidemiological malaria parameters, accounting for sources of observed and unobserved heterogeneity (link). Additionally, he is interested in the use of Network Analysis as a novel approach for the development of malaria elimination strategies.

Alessandro holds a MSc in Economic and Social Sciences from Bocconi University (Milan), and has worked in the past as a

Research Fellow in Health Economics within the Team for Economic Evaluation and Health Technology Assessment (TEEHTA) at the Centre for Health Economics of the University of York (UK).