Publication: What’s the difference? A gender perspective on understanding educational inequalities in all-cause and cause-specific mortality

Background. Material and behavioural factors play an important role in explaining educational inequalities in mortality, but gender differences in these contributions have received little attention thus far. We examined the contribution of a range of …

Publication: Cohabitation and mental health: Is psychotropic medication use more common in cohabitation than marriage?

Abstract. Marriage is associated with better mental health. While research on the mental health of cohabiting individuals has increased in recent years, it has yielded mixed results thus far. We assessed whether the mental health …

Publication: Assessing the impact of natural policy experiments on socioeconomic inequalities in health: How to apply commonly used quantitative analytical methods?

Background. The scientific evidence-base for policies to tackle health inequalities is limited. Natural policy experiments (NPE) have drawn increasing attention as a means to evaluating the effects of policies on health. Several analytical methods can …

About me

Welcome to my personal webpage!

Currently I am a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University, working with Mara Yerkes on her ERC project CAPABLE. Within this project I will focus on cross-national analyses of work-life balance and (self-reported) health and well-being using cross-sectional and longitudinal survey data.

Previously I was a Research Scientist at the Laboratory of Population Health at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. Here, I was involved in several projects focusing on social determinants of health and life expectancy, mainly focusing on education, and work and family factors.I will remain a guest researcher at the MPIDR until August 2021. My PhD in Public HEalth from the Erasmus MC focused on the contribution of inequalities in work-family factors and socioeconomic status to the US health disadvantage.

This website provides a summary of my research and publications.

Publication: Marital status, labour force activity and mortality: A study of the United States and 6 European countries

Aims. Labour force activity and marriage share some pathways through which they potentially influence health. In this paper, we examine whether marriage and labour force participation interact in the way they influence mortality in the USA …

Publication: The contribution of national disparities to international differences in mortality between the United States and 7 European countries

Objectives. This study examined to what extent the higher mortality in the United States compared to many European countries is explained by larger social disparities within the United States. We estimated the expected US mortality …