Johanna van der Bom is professor of Clinical Epidemiology in particular transfusion medicine and head of the Jon J. van Rood Center for Clinical Transfusion Research at Sanquin Research (www.cctr.org).

More information about Anske Van der Bom

Clinical epidemiology

From data to value; value for patients and value for population health – that is clinical epidemiology. It provides quantitative knowledge about the effects of medical interventions and the diagnosis, etiology, and prognosis of disease.

Van der Bom is committed to quantifying the effects (intended and unintended) of transfusions. If a patient suffers from a deficiency of one or more components of her/his blood this component - seperated from the blood of a donor – can be transfused into a blood vessel of the patient. Despite centuries of experience and improvement of transfusions, the vast majority of transfusions is based on physiological principles rather than quantitative knowledge about its effects. Thanks to progress in the field of technology and the ambitions of healthcare to quantify value for patients it is now increasingly realistic to predict for each patient whether the intended effects of transfusion outweigh the unintended effects. Van der Bom’s research helps to optimize value for patients with hemophilia, women with major obstetric hemorrhage, critically ill adult and neonatal patients and patients with hematological malignancies. 

This research contributes to NWA questions about personalized medicine, big data, machine learning and value-based medicine.

Academic career

Johanna (Anske) G. van der Bom studied medicine at the Leiden University. She worked 18 months as a resident internal medicine in the Groene Hart Hospital in Gouda. Her PhD thesis and MSc in Clinical Epidemiology she did at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. The titel of her PhD thesis (1997) is 'Haemostasis and Cardiovascular disease'. As clinical epidemiologist and assistant professor of Clinical Epidemiology she worked at the University Medical Center Utrecht. In 2003 she started as an associate professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the Leiden University Medical Center. She was a visiting scholar at Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts (2004) and the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (2008). In 2011 she was appointed head of the Jon J. van Rood Center for Clinical Transfusion Research and in december 2013 as professor of Clinical Epidemiology in particular transfusion medicine. The title of her inaugural lecture is 'Where is the best physician?'. From 2015 to 2018 she was visiting professor at the Universidade de Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brasil.