Maartje Basten (assistant professor at the department of Health Sciences) is a psychologist and epidemiologist with a keen interest in mental health across the life course: from emotional and behavioral problems in preschool children to dementia in elderly. In her work she uses data from prospective cohort studies to study longitudinal trends in mental health, risk and protective factors of mental health problems and the link between mental and physical health. She has an interest in methodology and the application of (longitudinal) statistical techniques.
PAST RESEARCH
After her master’s degrees in Human Movement Sciences and Clinical Psychology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, she started her PhD at the department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry/ Psychology at the Erasmus UMC in Rotterdam. Het PhD thesis, entitled ‘Poor self-regulation in young children’ (2014) is part of the Generation R study, a large prospective cohort study from foetal life until young adulthood in a multi-ethnic urban population. During her PhD she studied the co-occurrence of internalising and externalising problems in preschool children, the etiology of co-occurring problems and the stability of these problems across the preschool period. As part of her PhD she completed a MSc in Epidemiology at the Netherlands Institute for Health Sciences (NIHES). After her PhD she had a 1-year postdoc appointment at the University of Warwick (UK), where she studied the long-term consequences of preterm birth on academic abilities at school-age and socioeconomic outcomes in adulthood, using data from British birth cohort studies. From 2016 - 2024 she worked together with the GGD Amsterdam, RIVM and UMC Utrecht on several projects in the field of HIV: she performed longitudinal studies on sexual behaviour, risk perception and risk of HIV among men who have sex with men using data from the Amsterdam Cohort Studies and she was involved in a mixed-methods study on the potential impact of a cure for HIV for people with HIV and key populations. Between 2019 and 2022, she was one of the main researchers in the PSYchosocial factors and CAncer (PSY-CA) consortium involving 22 prospective cohort studies to examine the impact of depression, anxiety, and other psychosocial factors on cancer incidence. She focused on the potential interaction between psychosocial factors and health behaviors in relation to cancer incidence and the methodology to study interaction within individual participant data meta-analysis. At the UMC Utrecht, she was also involved in several studies on the etiology of stroke and dementia.
CURRENT ACTIVITIES
Maartje is project leader of the COvid-19 measures and Child Outcomes (COCO) project. The aim of this project is to investigate the medium-term impact of COVID-19 measures on health, development, and equity of preschool children (0-4 years) and mental health of their parents using a mixed-methods approach including two large prospective cohorts, digital storytelling, and future planning sessions. She is a research coordinator at the Sarphati cohort Amsterdam, a dynamic prospective cohort on the growth and development of Amsterdam children aged from 0 to 18 years. Her teaching activities involve the coordination of the premaster Health Sciences, and she is examiner of two courses in methodology and applied biostatistics within the premaster program.
