Professor Arfan Ikram (1980) is Professor and Chair of Epidemiology at the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam and also holds an adjunct professorship at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health in Boston. He also serves as president of the Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development (ZonMW), the largest Dutch funder of health care research.
Prof. Ikram’s research focuses on dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, healthy aging and multimorbidity. He aims to unravel the etiology and mechanisms underlying these conditions within the settings of population-based cohort studies and large biobanks, particularly the Rotterdam Study. Additionally, he has a distinct interest in developing and applying novel causal inference methods in his research. He has set up various international consortia and received multiple personal, project and consortium grants. In the last 5 years, prof. Ikram has leveraged his longstanding experience in epidemiology by setting up and contributing to various (inter)national large-scale infrastructures, including LoCARPON (cohort study in India), ELSA-Brasil (cohort study in Brazil), HEALTH-RI (Dutch health care data infrastructure), BBMRI, Netherlands Cohort Consortium, and EraCORe (cohort study of COVID-19)
