Judith Verstegen is an Associate Professor in Geo-Information Science at Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning. Her research and teaching focus on spatially modelling and analyzing the interaction between people and their environment. Her main methods of expertise are geosimulation modelling and spatial optimization. Collaboration with domain experts is the most enjoyable as well as the most essential part of her work, as they have the theories and data about these systems needed to build and evaluate models.
Judith is involved in the COMPOSE project, which has the aim to investigate the combined effectiveness of policy measures to target the food environment on diet quality to prevent obesity and NCD risk. She supervises PhD candidate Chiara Richardt in this project and contributes through her expertise in geosimulation modelling.
I hope to cross-fertilize the health science domain with methods from geo-information science.
The environment we live in has a dominant impact on our health. It explains an estimated seventy percent of the chronic disease burden. Where we live, what we eat, how much we exercise, the air we breathe and whom we associate with; all of these environmental factors play a role. The combination of these factors over the life course is called the exposome. There is general (scientific) consensus that understanding more about the exposome will help explain the current burden of disease and that it provides entry points for prevention and ...
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