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Prof. Dr. Hans Savelberg is a professor of Evolving Academic Education at the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences of Maastricht University. Being both a human movement scientist and an educational scientist, he is interested in a variety of research topics. As a human movement scientist, he worked on the impact of muscle weakness on gait performance in people with diabetic neuropathy, relating adverse plantar pressure zones to muscle incapacity in the leg. Moreover, he is keen to better understand the impact physical activity behaviour on health and cognitive performance. He is involved in studies in various age groups, studying not only the effects of physical activity behaviour on health and cognition, but also trying to discover the underlying biological mechanisms. As professional in higher education, he is fascinated by the question how educational arrangements should be optimized to thrive students’ and teachers’ intrinsic motivation. In his work, he has an eye for the complexity and wickedness of real-life problems. To value this wickedness and contribute to useful solutions, he prefers to work in a transdisciplinary context.

Dr. Annemarie Koster is an epidemiologist with a broad background in the epidemiology of aging. Her primary research line focusses on lifestyle and in particular physical activity. Her research is aimed to a better understanding of the causes and consequences of physical activity and she is particularly interested in the health effects of sedentary behaviour. Moreover, she is interested in the objective assessment of physical activity and sedentary behaviour. She has successfully led several projects within this research line. She has mainly used data from large epidemiological studies such as The Maastricht Study. Long_Bio

Dr. Brenda Berendsen works as assistant professor and focuses on the identification of health promoting physical activity patterns. Her work connects the fields of data sciences, movements sciences and health promotion. Recent projects applied Artificial Intelligence to the Maastricht Study dataset to expose specific aspects of physical activity patterns that relate to health indicators in healthy people and type 2 diabetes patients.

Prof. dr. Nicolaas Schaper, endocrinologist, is a well-known expert on diabetes, health effects of mobility and diabetes education. He is co-founder of the Maastricht Study. He is chair of the International Working Group on the Diabetic Foot and the International Symposium on the Diabetic Foot, recipient of several (inter)national grants and awards and author of >300 scientific publications.