MUMC+ honorary medal for professor Piet van den Brandt

A pioneer

Piet van den Brandt is one of the Dutch pioneers in nutritional epidemiology. In the 1980s, he co-founded the Netherlands Cohort Study (NLCS), which involved over 120,000 Dutch participants. As of 2024, this study is still ongoing and continues to contribute to new scientific insights and lifestyle recommendations. The NLCS study is also part of the International Pooling Project. It was Piet's visionary initiative to start research on the molecular epidemiology of cancer thirty years ago in collaboration with the Department of Pathology at MUMC+. In education, he was instrumental in establishing the master’s program in Epidemiology and served as a trainer for the Epidemiologist A and B programs. Additionally, he chaired the Department of Epidemiology for ten years and temporarily took on the management of the Oncology Center as a non-clinician. He also served as the scientific director of the GROW research institute, a role that perfectly matched his profile, but from which he unfortunately had to step down earlier than expected due to health reasons.

We congratulate Piet on this special distinction and wish him good luck in his next phase of his life, in good health and together with his loved ones.