Dr. Gerdien Van Schaik

Biography

Gerdien van Schaik graduated in 1995 from Wageningen University with a degree in quantitative veterinary epidemiology. In 2000, she completed her PhD thesis titled “Introduction infectious disease dairy farms” within the Department of Farm Economics at Wageningen University. She has worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Population Medicine group at Cornell University in the USA and has served as an associate professor in the Preventive Medicine group at Universidad Austral de Chile since October 2004. Until July 2021, she was head of the Epidemiology Group at Royal GD, working as a senior epidemiologist on a 0.5 FTE basis. Her research focuses on evaluating current surveillance activities, improving innovative quantitative methods, and risk-based and syndromic surveillance. She coordinates the Horizon 2020 project DECIDE, which involves 19 partners across 11 countries with a budget of €10 million aimed at reducing the impact of endemic infections in livestock and aquaculture. Additionally, she is appointed to the expert panel for the SDa project Care Young Animals (0.1 FTE). She delivered her inaugural lecture on Monitoring Surveillance of Farm Animal Health on October 11, 2016.

Research Interests

Experience