Specialization
Pediatric Intensive Care Medicine & Global Child Health
Focus of research
Pediatric critical care in low resource settings
Over the past 20 years I have performed research concerning several topics affecting care of critically ill children in low resource settings. Subtopics include
1. Technical advances to timely identify critically ill children. Over the past 3 years this has been my major topic of research. Most recent success is that I secured a large EU grant (3.4 million euro) as the PI on the IMPALA project. This project, performed by 7 international institutes, is aimed at developing an innovative vital signs monitor to timley identify deterioration of critically ill children. The monitor applies several innovative techniques including new sensors, artificial intelligence and robust and simple hard and software sollutions. The model builds on pilot data from 3 studies I recently performed in Malawi and are currently being analysed by my team consiting of Dutch PhD student (R Assies), a Malawian MMED student and several Dutch Master students.
2. Circulatory failure & Severe anaemia: Based on my initial PhD thesis (distinction) I supervised a PhD project concerning severe anaemia (F Jonker). In preparation of the above described project aimed at develpment of an innovative patient monitor for low income countries we performed several studies concerning new markers (CRI and HRV) and new prediction models to indentify children with shock.
3. Severe infectious diseases: as a spin off of my own PhD, and prior to focussing on ICU related topics, I supervised 4 PhD students (Sigaloff, Boender, Boerma, Huibers) in the field of HIV care and studied severe infections in African children.