Annemarie Koster (A.)

• Epidemiology
• Accelerometry
• Physical activity, Sedentary behaviour, Sleep
• Socioeconomic Health Differences
• Cohort studies

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After obtaining a Master of Science degree in Nutrition and Health Sciences from Wageningen University and a Master of Science degree in Epidemiology, Registered by the Netherlands Epidemiological Society, in 2002 Annemarie Koster started her PhD training at the former department of Health Care Studies at Maastricht University. Her PhD research focused on the explanation of socioeconomic health differences in old age.

After receiving her PhD degree in 2005, she obtained an American fellowship at National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute on Aging (NIA) in Bethesda, MD, USA. Within the Laboratory of Epidemiology, Demography, and Biometry with Dr. Tamara B. Harris, she continued her research in the field of aging.

From 2006 until 2011, dr. Koster worked at NIA and her research focussed on causes and consequences of obesity, changes in body composition, and physical (in)activity in old age. She worked with different large cohort studies including the Health ABC Study, AGES-Reykjavik Study, the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study, and NHANES. At NIA, dr. Koster had the opportunity to develop a program around assessment of physical activity in older adults using objective measurements. The first component of the study consisted in setting up an ancillary study within the AGES-Reykjavik Study in Iceland to collect accelerometry data in a large group of older adults. The second component was the development of new methods to analyze accelerometry data.

In 2011, she returned to Maastricht University and where she is currently  Associate Professor of Lifestyle Epidemiology  at the Department of Social Medicine. Her research is aimed to a better understanding of the causes and consequences of physical (in)activity, sedentary behavious and sleep. Moreover, Annemarie is interested in the objective assessment of physical behavior. 

She is part of the management team of The Maastricht Study, at present the largest epidemiological study focusing on type 2 diabetes worldwide, and she has led the accelerometer component within this study. Moreover, she is co-leading the global consortium the Prospective Physical Activity, Sitting, and Sleep (ProPASS) consortium, an international collaboration platform committed to harmonise thigh-worn accelerometry data to investigate longitudinal associations of physical activity, posture, and sleep with long-term health outcomes and longevity. Further, she is one of the principal investigators of the Netherlands Cohorts Consortium (NCC) in which they aim to establish a unique infrastructure of prospective cohort studies in the Netherlands, a nationwide large scale infrastructure for population health sciences.