Hans Verhoef

Background

About Hans Verhoef

I am driven by the idea that the great adventure in global nutrition and health lies in gathering and using data to solve interesting and big, real-world problems. There's few things more rewarding than helping to tackle undernutrition and infectious diseases that affect billions of children and pregnant women. Over the years, I have led pioneering research that has been crucial in developing policies for the mandatory fortification of industrially produced flour with iron and other micronutrients in low-income countries, as well as policies for seasonal chemoprevention to control malaria among children in the Sahel region (covering 49 million children in 2022). I have lived and worked in Mexico, the Pacific and primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. My 35+ years expertise is mostly focused on the control of anaemia, iron deficiency and malaria. I am currently supervising and supporting a randomised trial to measure the effect of ibuprofen and multiple micronutrient supplementation on menstrual blood loss, iron status and quality of life in menstruating Malawian adolescent girls. Additionally, I have led and conducted research on deficiencies of vitamins and other minerals including vitamin A, zinc and folate. I have conducted work to understand the links between gut infections (e.g, intestinal helminths, Giardia intestinalis, Salmonella, Campylobacter, pathogenic E. coli), their potential environmental risk factors (e.g. livestock ownership, hygiene conditions), gut inflammation and child growth. At earlier stages of my career, I worked as a medical entomologist on the control of malaria, environmental management for disease vector control, land and water resource management for vector control and health impact assessment. As a clinical epidemiologist, I am deeply interested in the application and development of sound statistical methodology. It has been an enriching experience working over the years with colleagues and students from diverse disciplines, ranging from clinical sciences to plant breeding, and from chemistry to social sciences. I like to learn from others as much as I like teaching others. Methodology: randomised trials, diagnostic/prognostic studies, complex surveys, general and generalised linear models, discriminant analysis, screening, prediction models, fractional polynomials, count models, zero-inflated models, multiple imputation, truncated and censored data, two-part models, meta-analysis, principal components analysis, factor analyis, latent class analysis.