An ounce of prevention of worth a pound of cure – Benjamin Franklin
Besides being co-chair of the research program Health Behaviors & Chronic Diseases of APH, Mackenbach is also assistant professor at the department of Epidemology & Data Science at Amsterdam UMC location VUmc.
Mackenbach has a background in health sciences (2012) and a PhD in epidemiology (2016). She is passionate about the effective and equitable prevention of chronic diseases via population-level approaches that target the context in which individuals make health-promoting or health-harming decisions. Following her PhD on ‘obesogenic environments’, she set up a research line around food environments and how they affect food intake and health outcomes. This work focuses on food prices, geographic food access and food policies. More recently, she has started a research line on the political and commercial determinants of diet-related diseases, with attention for the commercial determinants of health in the context of governance structures.