Assistant Professor
Biography
Born in Albania, Vjola Hoxhaj is a clinical epidemiologist and statistical programmer at the Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care, UMC Utrecht, where she is pursuing her PhD. Her work focuses on real-world data (RWD) and the methods used to assess and strengthen its quality for medicine and vaccine safety research. She is particularly interested in whether data from different healthcare systems and databases is accurate, complete, and comparable enough to be trusted for public-health and regulatory decisions.
She currently works on vaccine Post-Authorization Safety Studies (PASS), which monitor the real-world safety of vaccines once they are in routine use, helping to detect or confirm risks that pre-authorization clinical trials are not designed to pick up. She is the lead author of INSIGHT, a tool for fit-for-purpose evaluation and quality assessment of observational data sources, and has developed the accompanying R-based data-quality pipelines used across the VAC4EU network and related EMA-tendered studies. Her work combines epidemiological research, statistical programming in R, and regulatory and scientific writing.
