dr. Ronald de Vlaming

Assistant Professor, School of Business and Economics, Econometrics and Data Science

Assistant Professor, Amsterdam Neuroscience, Amsterdam Neuroscience - Complex Trait Genetics

Personal information

Ronald de Vlaming works as a tenured assistant professor at the Department of Econometrics and Data Science in the School of Business and Economics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU). He joined the VU in 2017.

His teaching is focused on mathematics, statistics, econometrics, machine learning, and computer science. His research is at the intersection of econometrics, economics, bioinformatics, statistics, and machine learning. In his research, he seeks to develop scalable and consistent methods to uncover the biological causes of health and wealth inequalities.

Ronald obtained his PhD from Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2017. During his time as PhD student, he was a visiting researcher at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, which is part of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Ronald is currently affiliated with the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium.

Research

Socioeconomic status, intelligence, and health tend to go hand in hand, and are, to a considerable degree, transmitted from one generation to the next, leading to wealth and health inequalities. The underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. However, decades of twin studies have established that virtually every human trait is driven by an interplay of genes (and, by extension, biology) and environment. The increasing availability of large-scale genetic data allows researchers to better understand the biological causes of such disparities and how these drive their intergenerational transmission.

Ronald's research is at the forefront of this development. He designs new statistical methods (or combines existing ones in novel ways), such that the resulting methods (1) are sufficiently versatile to capture important real-life dynamics, (2) can handle data for hundreds of thousands of individuals on millions of so-called biomarkers, (3) take into account important sources of bias and/or inconsistency, and (4) are published with accompanying open-source tools, enabling other researchers to apply his methods to their data.

His work has been published in journals such as Nature Genetics, PLOS Genetics, the International Journal of Epidemiology, Nature Communications, and Nature Human Behaviour.

Teaching

Ronald has developed, coordinated, and taught various courses (both large- and small-scale courses) on topics in mathematics, statistics, econometrics, machine learning, and computer science, mainly at the undergraduate level. In addition, he has directed and taught several summer school courses at the Tinbergen Institute. These courses are more geared towards professionals, policymakers, and PhD students. As of September 2025, he is one of the programme coordinators of the bachelor programmes in Econometrics and Operations Research (EOR) and Econometrics and Data Science (EDS).

In his upcoming Senior Teaching Qualification (Dutch: Seniorkwalificatie Onderwijs or SKO) project, he will focus on bridging the gap between high-school mathematics and the first year of university in the EOR and EDS programmes. Moreover, in his role as programme coordinator he is exploring ways to reinforce and extend the added value of EOR and EDS graduates for employers, especially in the context of a changing job market due to artificial intelligence.

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