Below you can find an overview of the lecturers of the EBQ-editons held in 2019 and 2021. Although the people involved may slightly change over the years, you can still have an idea of the profiles of out teaching staff we attract in our course. Click on the right cross to read more about their skills and expertise.
Sibyl Anthierens
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
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
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.
Jean-Pierre Van geertruyden
Prof. Jean-Pierre Van geertruydenis 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
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
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.