As of June 1, 2021, APH researcher Femke Lamers is the new program leader of the APH program Mental Health. At the moment she wil work together with Aartjan Beekman and she will lead the program for the upcoming years. She is the successor of Jos Bosch.

Femke Lamers (Assistant professor at the department of Psychiatry at Amsterdam UMC) was trained in Human nutrition and in Epidemiology (2003). She obtained her PhD in Medicine/Epidemiology from the Maastricht University in 2008. She was further trained at the National Institute of Mental Health, USA from 2010-2013, with support of an NWO Rubicon fellowship. In 2013 she returned to Amsterdam on an FP7-Marie Skłodowska-Curie Career Integration fellowship to work in the Department of Psychiatry at VUmc.

Her research focuses on the overlap between psychiatric and somatic disease, including shared etiological pathways (e.g. inflammation), depression heterogeneity and personalized treatment. She is also involved in several studies using ambulatory assessments (EMA, passive data collection through smartphones, actigraphy) to unravel depression and predict relapse.