Miriam Sturkenboom

Miriam Sturkenboom is head of the Department of Datascience and Biostatistics in the Julius Center at University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands. She has a PhD from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics in Groningen (cum laude), a pharmacy degree from the same University and a Master in Epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health. She is past president of the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology. She served as expert to EMA, FDA, WHO and many other organizations. She was professor of Observational Data Anlysis at the department of Medical Informatics at Erasmus MC till 2017, and currently is professor of Real World Evidence at the University Medical Center Utrecht

Her research interests focus on transforming real world data into real world evidence on drug use, effectiveness and safety in vulnerable populations (children, pregnancy and elderly). Her research focuses on the creation of international ecosystems that allow for big data mining, pooling and analysis to learn about the use and effects of drugs after marketing. These infrastructures have been tested and used as prototypes in many distributed networks in projects funded by the European Commission, the Innovative Medicines Initiative, the European Medicines Agency, ECDC, and also privately funded projects that she coordinate(d/s). She was coordinator of the IMI funded ADVANCE public private collaboration, aiming to establish a tested system for the monitoring of benefits and risks of vaccines. She is coordinator of the IMI-funded ConcepTION project, building an ecosystem to assess drugs safety in pregnancy and lactation. She was member of the WHO Global Advisory Committee for Vaccine Safety. She is president of the Vaccine Monitoring Collaboration for Europe (vac4eu.org)  and coordinates several studies on COVID019 vaccine safety monitoring for the European Medicines Agency