Joreintje Mackenbach

Joreintje Mackenbach is a registered epidemiologist and assistant professor at the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Amsterdam Public Health research institute, based at the VU University Medical Center.

Joreintje has a background in Health Sciences (Policy & Management and Public Health) and obtained her PhD in 2016 (cum laude) with a thesis on 'obesogenic environments'. She is currently working on the upstream determinants of lifestyle behaviours and chronic disease risk.

In 2017, she received a personal research grant from NWO. With this Veni, she will investigate how the food environment influences food choices, and why this may be different for different populations. Further, Joreintje is project manager of the Supreme Nudge project, a 5-year project financed by the Dutch Heart Foundation and ZonMw, that uses environmental interventions to improve cardiometabolic health. In 2020, the H2020 Expanse project and the NWO Gravity Exposome-NL project kicked off, both focused on the exposomal (environmental) influences in cardiometabolic health. 

Joreintje is particularly interested in understanding why and how our living environments influence behaviours and health, and she aims to combine insights from epidemiology with theories, tools and methods from other disciplines such as geography and psychology.