Wageningen University & Research
The mission of Wageningen University and Research is "To explore the potential of nature to improve the quality of life". Under the banner Wageningen University & Research, Wageningen University and the specialised research institutes of the Wageningen Research Foundation have joined forces in contributing to finding solutions to important questions in the domain of healthy food and living environment.
With its roughly 30 branches, 6.500 employees and 12.500 students, Wageningen University & Research is one of the leading organisations in its domain. An integrated approach to problems and the cooperation between various disciplines are at the heart of Wageningen's unique approach. WUR has been named Best Employer in the Education category for 2019-2020.
These are the points our employees list as good reasons to come work at WUR:
read the 5 reasons to come work at WURConsumption and Healthy Lifestyles groupConsumption and Healthy Lifestyles group is a young and ambitious chair group that was initiated in 2019 and is rapidly growing. The group currently consists of 1 chair/professor, > 10 senior lecturing & research positions, > 25 (junior) researchers and PhD students, and an administrative and support team. The group is keen to unravel the origins of healthy and sustainable consumption and lifestyle behaviours. These behavioural insights are used to design, evaluate and implement strategies to enable healthy and sustainable consumption. These strategies include upstream environmental and downstream behavioural interventions acknowledging that individual behaviour is socially embedded and arises in specific times and places. The
work of the group is characterized by an inter- and transdisciplinary approach where different academic disciplines (e.g., public health, epidemiology, sociology, psychology, and geography) and professional fields (policy, practice) collaborate. The group contributes to different educational programmes (e.g., Consumer Studies, Health and Society, and Nutrition and Health).
Examples of ongoing research projects can be found
here. Projects focus for instance on lifestyle interventions in specific populations, such as for the prevention of cognitive decline in elderly (MOCIA project), to alleviate fatigue in cancer patients (SoFIT), or nutrition education in school-aged children (Tasting lessons project). Digitalisation and e/mHealth are central topics across projects, such as the use of embodied conversational agents to interact with elderly about diet (PACO project) or the use of novel location-based technologies with GPS or beacons to provide individualized adaptive interventions (VIDI Food navigation project).
As we acknowledge the importance of context in individual behaviour, our research also aims to create a supportive environment for healthy and sustainable lifestyles. In addition to macro food environment studies (e.g., Regiodeal Foodvalley, NWO Tipping the balance), we investigate how more subtle adaptations (nudges) may contribute to healthier diets (e.g., ZonMw Top programme HINTS). Creating the right environment, also includes the structural socio-economic conditions that contribute to unhealthy lifestyles and health inequalities (e.g., poverty, stress, debt, vulnerable working populations, multi-problems, food aid receivers). These are for instance studied in the ZonMw projects on debts and poverty and the ZonMW
Werken is gezond project.