Dr Karin Van Veldhoven
BSc MSc PhD
Assistant Professor
in Molecular Epidemiology
I joined LSHTM as an assistant professor in November 2018.
Between October 2014 and November 2018 I worked as a postdoctoral Research Associate in Environmental Epidemiology at Imperial College London. This is also where I completed my PhD in 2014, entitled "Exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals and other hormone related variables, DNA methylation and breast cancer"
I am currently an Honorary Research Associate at Imperial College London.
Affiliations
Teaching
At LSHTM I teach on the "Extended Epi", "Epi and omics" and "Epidemiology of Non-Communicable Diseases (ENCD)" modules (part of the MSc Epidemiology), and I am a co-organiser of the latter. I am also a co-module organiser of the "Epidemiology for Health Data Science" module (part of the MSc Health Data Science). In addition I am a personal tutor on both MScs and on the distance learning ENCD sister module. Finally, I (co-)supervise MSc and PhD students.
Previously I have taught on the MPH & MSc Epidemiology and BSc Global Health at Imperial College London. In addition I have supervised MPH & MSc as well as BSc projects and I have acted as a personal tutor.
Research
As a molecular epidemiologist my main research interests are environmental exposures such as endocrine disrupting chemicals, water contaminants and air pollution in relation to omics and other biomarkers of exposure and disease.
I have worked on three studies within the European Commisson funded EXPOsOMICS project where I was the leader of two working groups. I have extensive experience in analysing epigenomics, metabolomic, transcriptomic and adductomic data and I am interested in developing novel statistical methods to analyse multiple exposures and multiple omics (cross-omics) in order to provide insight in the aetiology of diseases and determination of causal pathways by linking exposure data to biochemical and molecular changes in our body.
My current research focusses on epidemiological and biostatistical approaches to study asthma, kidney disease and cardiovascular diseases globally. I work on various occupational COVID-19 studies and I'm involved in the EU funded Health Environment Research Agenda for Europe (HERA) project.
I am a member of the International Epidemiological Association (IEA), the Molecular Epidemiology Group UK (MEG-UK), the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) and an editorial board member of Frontiers in Public Health