Heart failure poses a large burden on patients and healthcare, largely because heart failure patients have low fitness and require frequent hospitalisation for close monitoring. In CardiacCare@Home, researchers work together with patients, doctors, industry, and others to develop technology for home-based monitoring of cardiac function and rehabilitation. This approach facilitates early detection of worsening of cardiac function, which allows doctors to rapidly alter treatment and prevent hospitalisation. Moreover, home-based rehabilitation will improve patients’ fitness levels. Technological innovations will facilitate a new care path that improves patients’ quality of life and lower socio-economic costs, and lower burden for hospital staff.

The significance of zebrafish for biomedical research is rapidly increasing globally . As a vertebrate species, they can model for the phenotypic outcome of genetic alteration and in many cases provide a model for human disease. The research of the applicant focuses on myopia that is spreading epidemically in the human population, and other collaborating groups focus on cognition disorders. The great success of biomedical modelling in fish is also a pitfall as it is quite impossible to maintain lines for longer periods of time by breeding. Also, catalogues of collections will never be accurate unless the material is available in a sustainable way. The zebrafish research community is commonly exchanging materials but only sustainable archives (cryopreserved) can adequately cater for cataloguing and exchange according to FAIR data stewardship. Also, models need to remain available to verify scientific outcomes, as there is a general concern about the reproducibility of research outcomes, and characterized models need to investigated and applied wider. To advance zebrafish archiving technology will be of immediate and long term benefit of life sciences research, both biomedical and fundamental. The candidate is an expert in animal reproductive technology.

Erasmus University Rotterdam is the founding organisation of the Netherlands Institute for Health Sciences (NIHES). NIHES was accredited as research school by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in 1992, and re-accredited 1997, 2002 and 2008 (see Appendix I). In 2007, an International Review and Advisory Committee evaluated the overall quality of the NIHES research groups involved, as well as the international teaching programme as outstanding, meeting the highest international standards. NIHES mission is to further improve scientific education and research in determinants of diseases and health, the efficiency and effectiveness of health care and services, and the theory and methods of health sciences. The institute provides high quality, internationally attractive and competitive research training programmes in quantitative medicine and health sciences for Masters students and PhD students. NIHES participates in the Erasmus MC research Masters programme in Clinical Research (re-accreditation in progress) and collaborates narrowly with the research school Molecular Medicine. For Masters students NIHES offers a two-year full time research Masters programme in Health Sciences and a one-year full time or part-time Masters programme in Health Sciences, both with specializations in epidemiology, clinical epidemiology, genetic epidemiology and public health. Upon completion of the Masters programme the students receive a Master of Science degree in Health Sciences. A recent re-accreditation report by the Accreditation Organisation of the Netherlands and Flanders (NVAO) evaluated the two-year research Masters programme as excellent with respect to the learning outcomes, educational programme, lecturers involved and success rate. At an international level, the NIHES Masters programmes in Health Sciences are comparable to Masters programmes of leading schools in epidemiology and public health elsewhere in Europe (the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) and in the United States of America (Harvard School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health), regarding the quality as well as the contents of the programmes. Several NIHES lecturers hold an adjunct professorship at Harvard School of Public Health, and there is a close research collaboration between NIHES and the top institutes mentioned above. One of the key features of the NIHES education and research programme is that students choose their own research topic and field of research. After a series of rotations that introduces them to a wide range of research topics spanning molecular medicine, epidemiology, statistics and genetics, PhD students continue their research training by attending more advanced courses, to deepen and broaden their knowledge, thereby building upon the knowledge gained during the Masters phase according to the self-selected specialization. They may choose among the nearly 100 available NIHES courses, but they are also encouraged to find suitable courses elsewhere at Erasmus MC (e.g. in the research schools Molecular Medicine or Medical Genetics) or at other universities. This application focuses on a new, highly challenging graduate sub-programme, in which the emphasis is on the combination of genetic epidemiology and molecular medicine, under the heading of Clinical & Genetic Epidemiology. The main goal of this sub-programme is to enable promising students who want to pursue an academic career on the cross road of clinical and genetic epidemiology and molecular medicine to become part of the next generation of top researchers in the field of genomic research. In the graduate sub-programme Clinical & Genetic Epidemiology expertise in the programmes of genetic epidemiology is combined with that of molecular medicine. Prof. Dr. van Duijn is the coordinator of the new sub-programme. In this area, key issues are the discovery of genes related to major diseases and the efforts in the translation of gene-findings for clinical medicine, i.e. treatment or prevention. Advances in genetic epidemiology research are rapidly unravelling the role of genetic factors in the pathogeneses of common diseases such as heart disease, osteoporosis, asthma, and type 2 diabetes. One major promise is that these advances will lead to personalized medicine, where preventive and therapeutic interventions for complex diseases can be individually tailored to a persons genetic profile. Developments in high-throughput technologies are also creating a constant demand for new statistical approaches; statistical genetics now plays an important role in gene discovery and in translational studies. In the framework of the Erasmus MC Graduate School, NIHES works together with other KNAW accredited research schools (Molecular Medicine, Cardiology, Medical Genetics). For this application targeting Clinical & Genetic Epidemiology, Molecular Medicine is the main partner. Both NIHES and Molecular Medicine have a major interest and track record in etiological research but both are working on a translational studies as new subject of interest. With this application we aim to extend the collaboration in a joint training programme in which participants can specialize in experimental, etiologic, prognostic or molecular research after rotating course modules and exploring the disease specific research programmes of the groups involved.

Research on dementia and the brain is biased towards Europe and the United States, leaving most of the world population under or unrepresented. The goal of this proposal is to increase representation amongst those populations, to explore robust and geographically-specific associations between the brain and dementia. To increase representation, we will aid groups to have better access to the resources they need to be involved within research and then investigate the relationship between markers of brain changes, dementia and genetics. This will give us better information on how dementia differs in the brain across populations for better clinical care.