Houwing-Duistermaat performs research at the interface of statistics and application domains, such as bioinformatics, genetics, epidemiology, and biophysics. Disease and health are both influenced by biological mechanisms. Technological developments make it possible to measure datasets that contain information about these mechanisms. These datasets are becoming more and more complex and expanding exponentially in size. It is therefore a challenge to derive “simple” statistical models that describe data appropriately and provide insight into these mechanisms. Houwing-Duistermaat’s goal is to develop these models.
"Retrieving information from complex data comes with a number of statistical challenges: the various datasets have to be integrated, their dimensions have to be reduced, and their relationships to health have to be modelled,” says Houwing-Duistermaat. “I have developed models for the analysis of multiple cross-sectional omics datasets. In Nijmegen, I plan to focus on modelling multiple longitudinal omics in order to gain insight into dynamic mechanisms. I am also open to new collaborations related to omics and other complex data sets. In the past, , for example, I have developed methods that can be applied in urban analytics.”
About Jeanine Houwing-Duistermaat
Jeanine Houwing-Duistermaat (Zwolle, 1968) studied Mathematics at Utrecht University. In 1997, she received her PhD for the thesis ‘Statistical methods for family data’, after which she worked as a postdoc and later an assistant professor at ErasmusMC. In 2010, Houwing-Duistermaat became professor of Statistical Genetics at Leiden University Medical Center, where she began developing methods for omics data in 2011. In 2015, Houwing-Duistermaat was appointed as professor of Data Analytics and Statistics at the University of Leeds (UK). Since 2020, Houwing-Duistermaat has been professor of Statistics at the University of Bologna (Italy).
In 2005, Houwing-Duistermaat received the prestigious Vidi grant for her research. She has also coordinated EU projects, namely the MIMOmics consortium (2012-2017) and the Marie Curie Innovative Training Network IMforFUTURE (2017-2021). Houwing-Duistermaat was co-editor of the journal Biometrics (2013-2015).