Erasmus University Medical Center
The Erasmus University Medical Center (EMC) is the academic hospital of the city of Rotterdam, and home to the Erasmus University faculty of medicine. As the largest university medical center in the Netherlands, it plays a key role in research, education and patient care in the country. Erasmus' research combines its internationally acknowledged expertise in the fields of clinical, health and biomedical sciences
EMC ranks number 1 among the top European institutions in clinical medicine and number 20 in the world according to the Times Higher Education rankings.
Its aim is to translate bench discoveries to bedside applications and daily community care. Research at the medical faculty is centred on the fields of genetics, health sciences including epidemiology, biostatistics and public health, cardiovascular disease, neuroscience, endocrinology, oncology, immunology and hematology.
CoSTREAM's research will be conducted by the department of epidemiology.Its research focuses on cardiovascular disease epidemiology, epidemiology of neurological and psychiatric diseases and ophthalmologic diseases. In addition, research groups focus on genetic epidemiology, endocrinological epidemiology, pharmaco-epidemiology and on clinical epidemiology of radiological procedures. The department of epidemiology is home to two large prospective cohort studies, the Rotterdam Study including almost 15,000 participants over 45 years of age and Generation R, including almost 10,000 children and their parents.
The Rotterdam Study is an ongoing population-based, prospective cohort study, which started in 1990 in Rotterdam the Netherlands. Every 3 - 4 years the participants are invited for re-examination. Information routinely collected includes anthropometry, cardiovascular risk factors, and medication use. Extensive functional and imaging tests are performed as well, including cognitive testing, echocardiography and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Over 9,000 cognitivetests and more than 7,000 MRI scans are available, with several persons having multiple cognitive assessments and MRI-scans (around 3,400). Participants are followed-up up for a large range of diseases by linkage to the general practitioners’ and pharmancy databases.
The Rotterdam Study also has an extensive biobank. Genome-wide association data are available for the vast majority of participants(around 12,000) . The Rotterdam Study plays a large role in many global consortia for genetic studies, including CHARGE and ENGAGE.
Role in CoSTREAM
EMC is the project coordinator of CoSTREAM and participates in all work packages, and leads work package 7 on project management, dissemination and exploitation. EMC will provide overall scientific leadership to the project and contributes to the epidemiologic, metabolomic and imaging aspects of the project.
Key staff
Prof. Cornelia van Duijn is a professor of genetic epidemiology at the department of epidemiology at EMC. She serves as the project's scientific coordinator, and leads CoSTREAM on all scientific matters. She is also involved as a principle investigator in three large-scale population- and family-based studies: the Erasmus Rucphen Family (ERF) study, the Rotterdam study and Generation R. Her work focuses on –omics research in neurodegenerative disorders. She has identified genes involved in various neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson’s disease, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and open angle glaucoma. She is a leader in several international genome wide association consortia including CHARGE, ENGAGE, EAGLE and PERADES. She served on various scientific committees, including the International Society for Genetic Epidemiology (IGES), the American and European Society for Human Genetics (ASHG, ESHG). She founded EMC's MSc and PhD program in genetic epidemiology of which she is the scientific director.
Dr. M. Arfan Ikram, is head of neuroepidemiology in the Rotterdam Study. He has a longstanding interest in epidemiology of brain ageing and dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. Throughout his career he has used many state-of-the-art technologies implemented in population-based cohort studies. He has used a wide variety of imaging techniques, including structural MRI, diffusion tensor imaging, phase-contrast angiography and CT-scanning, as well as post-processing algorithms, including (semi-)automatic segmentation, linear and non-linear registration, voxel-based analysis, and tractography, to study various aspects of neurodegenerative disease. Additionally, he has broad expertise in conventional and emerging genomics technologies, including whole-genome genotyping arrays, exome arrays, and exome sequencing. In recent years, he has published several studies that combine imaging and genetics in the study of neurodegenerative disease. Dr. Ikram has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles and has a H-index of 34. He co-leads several national and international consortia, including neuro-CHARGE, UNIVERSE, JPND HD-READY, Dutch ImaGene.
Prof. Henning Tiemeier is a professor of psychiatric epidemiology at the departments of child and adolescent psychiatry, and epidemiology. His main areas of interest are the aetiology of common psychiatric disorders with a particular focus lifestyle, neurodevelopment and genetics. Other interests are methodological issues in psychiatric epidemiology, and sleep research. He has published over 300 peer-reviewed publications. His H-index is 35. He is a regular keynote speaker at academic conferences both nationally and internationally. He is the principle investigator of psychiatric research in the Rotterdam Study and the child psychiatric and cognitive research line in the Generation R Cohort. Since 2013 he is adjunct faculty at the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, as a professor of epidemiology teaching child psychiatric epidemiology. He (co-)leads several national and international consortia, including CHARGE-depression, CORNET, EAGLE-behaviour group and participates in the PGC consortium.
