I am a statistician at TNO (Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research),
Life Style expertise group in Leiden, and a scientist in the Quantitative Psychology
and Individual Differences Research Group of the Catholic University Leuven, Belgium.

My main area of interest in the field of statistics is the modelling of interaction effects in prediction problems. While many statistical models focus on the unique effects of predictive factors on one or more outcome variables, my challenge is to explore the way in which the combined influences of factors on an outcome can be assessed. A few of my special interests are:

• Treatment-subgroup interactions: interaction effects between a treatment variable and person characteristics indicating that a treatment effect differs for different groups of persons
• Tree-based models, recursive partitioning
• Regression and classification
• Meta-analysis
• Patient-tailored therapy
• Prediction of disabilities in children (Intellectual disability, Specific Language Impairment)
• Prediction of functional decline in elderly

Besides my statistics research, I like working together with behavioural and medical scientists. Transforming research problems into data analysis strategies and extracting the essential information from large data sets is a challenge I enjoy. More recently, I have become involved in discussing research outcomes with other experts from different fields and, where possible, transforming scientific knowledge into tools for use in everyday practice.