To make better decisions regarding healthcare use and lifestyle choices, we need information about the benefits and costs of these decisions. Different types of large-scale observational data sets, such as cohort studies, clinical registries and claims data, typically contain information on different types of descriptive data, benefits and costs. Analyzing these different types of data using a multidisciplinary approach holds the promise to deliver new insights that may help to improve health-related decisions at the individual, the organizational and the system level. We are a multidisciplinary group who are initiating the project 'A Lifecourse and Individual-based View on Lifestyle to Enhance health' (
ALIVE). ALIVE is one out of ten multidisciplinary Convergence Flagship projects that is jointly initiated and funded by Erasmus Medical Center, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Delft University of Technology for the duration of five years.
This research project is embedded in the Convergence Health & Technology: Shaping the future of health and healthcare. For this project, we are recruiting a postdoctoral fellow. This researcher will work on peer-reviewed publications on combining large observational data sets. This will not only contribute to answering important questions in a way that is not feasible when analyzing these data separately, but this will also be used as showcases that show the potential of combining data to other researchers at Erasmus MC and beyond. We have access to observational data and have started obtaining permission to link these data. These data enable us to apply the idea of biological age to brain data and use this framework to study disease-related decisions such as lifestyle choices and decisions related to care use. The postdoctoral fellow will generate findings on the health and health care use of people with specific diseases such as dementia. For this, the postdoctoral fellow will build on ideas developed as part of Convergence and leverage the unique datasets available to the team with their own ideas and their quantitative research skills. The findings will be published in scientific articles and presentations.
Furthermore, the postdoctoral fellow will be taking the lead in creating a data science network to collect, combine and provide data to support cross-study (e.g., cohorts, registries, national databases) and use their central position within the ALIVE project to play a key role in multidisciplinary research collaborations. The postdoctoral fellow will have the opportunity to participate in courses related to the research agenda