Jessica Kiefte-de Jong is professor of Population Health with emphasis on lifestyle and lifecourse epidemiology. She is member of the Dutch Health Council Committee on dietary recommendations for pregnant women and children up to 2 years, and board member of the Dutch Academy of Nutritional Sciences and the Dutch Innovation Centre of Lifestyle Medicine – Lifestyle4Health. She is also Dekker Laureate of the Dutch Heart Foundation.

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Prevention, Population Health and Disease Management

The research line of Jessica Kiefte-de Jong is embedded in the Department of Public Health and Primary Care and the Campus The Hague of the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC). She is involved in the LUMC research programme Prevention, Population Health and Disease Management – PrePod where she focusses on the LUMC themes lifestyle, prevention and lifecourse. In particular within the Interdisciplinary Population Health Living lab of the LUMC- Campus The Hague her efforts concentrates around the identification of vulnerable groups to provide targeted prevention interventions.  In addition to nutrition and lifestyle, she also studies the psychosocial and physical environment in this regard. She leads the study on food insecurity among disadvantaged families in the Hague and she is PI of the TEACHLIFE project, that studies teachable moments towards lifestyle change in healthcare. She is also connected to the Solid Start Programme in collaboration with the National Institute of Public Health and the Environment where she is involved as promotor in research on environmental factors and health in the first 1000 days of life.

Academic career

Jessica Kiefte-de Jong became a clinical dietitian at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences in 2004. After that she worked as a clinical dietitian in the Groene Hart Hospital in Gouda and Maasstad Hospital in Rotterdam (2004-2005). Subsequently, she obtained her MSc in Public Health Research and Nutrition at the VU University (2005-2008) while she continued her work as a clinical dietitian at the VU University Medical Center. In 2009 she decided to enroll a fulltime PhD trajectory at the Sophia Children's Hospital/Erasmus Medical Center (The Netherlands) where she obtained her PhD on Early Life Nutrition and Gastrointestinal and Allergic Outcomes in The Generation R Study in 2012. After that she was appointed as senior researcher on nutrition and health at the Department of Epidemiology and Pediatrics at Erasmus Medical Center, where she supervised various research projects on nutrition and health in large cohort studies (i.e. The Generation R Study, The Rotterdam Study and The B-Proof Study). In 2014 and 2016 she was a visiting research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health (USA) to study dietary factors involved in the development of type 2 diabetes mellitus. From 2014 to 2018 she was also appointed as an Assistant Professor at the Leiden University College, The Interdisciplinary International Honours College of Leiden University in The Hague (LUC) where she was the convener of the major Global Public Health. Her research output involves various interdisciplinary and collaborative projects around the themes Nutrition, Lifestyle and Lifecourse. With more than 150 publications in peer-reviewed journals, she has a H-index of 34 (Google Scholar 2019)/28 (Web of Science 2019)

Publications