Research Interests

My main interest is the study of change in people. More specifically, I’m interested in the ways we can model change in people statistically. In my work as a statistician at Parnassia Group, I often get involved in projects that study the mental improvement of patients receiving mental health care. For example, when comparing a new treatment for depression with the standard one, patients are randomly assigned to either condition and assessed on psychiatric symptoms before, after, and sometimes during treatment or during a follow-up period. With such data, I use statistical techniques to help determine whether the new treatment is more effective, both statistically and clinically. Such projects involve longitudinal data: repeated measurements within patients over time. Depending on the research design and questions, analyses may range from relatively simple to highly complex methods. A key challenge is to answer the research questions while keeping the analyses understandable for researchers and other stakeholders. I’m not only applying existing methods, I also work on developing new ones. One example is the cluster bootstrap, a relatively simple but powerful technique for complex longitudinal data. After all, researchers often already find statistics hard to understand, so why not make life a little bit easier for them? The development and investigation of the cluster bootstrap is the main focus of the PhD thesis I am currently working on, under supervision of prof. dr. Mark de Rooij at Leiden University. You can find more information on this subject in the Cluster Bootstrap section.