Dr. Martine Vrijheid is a professor of Environmental Epidemiology and head of the Childhood and
Environment Programme at the Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) in Barcelona. Her research
focuses on improving the understanding of environmental risk factors for child health and
development and the origins of disease, to underpin preventive action. Her research approach is
strongly nested in longitudinal cohort studies as a powerful platform for etiological research. She
leads and has led numerous national and international projects and has published extensively in this
field.
Dr. Vrijheid led the European collaborative HELIX (Human Early Life Exposome) project, funded by the
European Commission (EC) Framework Programme, in which she spearheaded the push for a more holistic
exposome approach to study multiple, co-existing exposures and their effects on child health
(neurodevelopment, cardiometabolic health, respiratory health). HELIX finalized the construction of
a "deep" exposome database with completely comparable chemical pollutant data, geospatial urban
environment data, child health outcome data, and multi-omics signatures, in mothers and children
from 6 European cohorts.
She is continuing early life exposome research as coordinator of the EC Horizon 2020 project ATHLETE
(Advancing Tools for Human Early Life-course Exposome Research and Translation), which aims to
advance important challenges in exposome research through improved tools, data, and translation.
Dr. Vrijheid is PI of the INMA birth cohort study in Spain, and as leader and collaborator in
several European grants, she has been instrumental in the building of a network of birth cohorts in
Europe, resulting in a FAIR data infrastructure for data sharing and harmonization across more than
30 European birth cohorts. She has authored over 300 publications, cited over 25000 times, with an
H-factor of 72.
She received her doctorate degree from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM)
and previously held positions as lecturer at LSHTM and as staff scientist at the International
Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, Lyon).
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