Bonnie van Dongen is assistant professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the department of Health Sciences. She started her carreer in the field of Health Sciences with a bachelor- and masterdegree at Wageningen University about Health and Society. This two-year master included a thesis in a general practitioners office about patient activation and an internship abroad at the University of Newcastle, Australia about the motivation of adolescent boys to participate in a school-based health promotion porgram called ATLAS. These opportunities helped cultivate a passion for qualitative research and school-based health promotion.
This passion was continued during her work as a PhD student at the VU. During this time she engaged for over four years in participatory research together with stakeholders in schools, such as students, school personnel and parents. In the FLASH-project, they together worked on creating a healthy school community by building community capacity for sustainable implementation of the Health Promoting School-framework, or in the Dutch context: Gezonde School. As part of this research project, a web-based platform was developed where materials and tools were combined into a freely available toolkit for teachers and other stakeholders.
After conclusion of this project, she remained involved in research projects focussed on the school setting and health promotion. This included a project were a training module for Healthy School advisors from the GGD was co-created about how to work in a context-oriented manner when supporting schools in the Healthy School program. She is still involved in providing this training to these advisors twice a year. Additionally, she was involved in a collaboration project with JOGG-NL about creating healthy food environments in and around secondary and vocational schools.
At the same time, she became more involved in academic education in the bachelor and master program of Health Sciences. These efforts are continued in her current position as assistant professor in the Health Sciences department. Here she strives towards connecting (academic) education, research and practice to enable people and society to make healthy choices, focussed on implementation processes of complex programs tailored to the reality of every-day practice, the school setting and health literacy of young people.
