Keynote Presenters
Leslie I. Boden, PhD
Professor of Public Health
Department of Environmental Health
Boston University
USA
Les Boden is an economist, and much of his research has focused on highlighting the economic and human consequences of injuries and illnesses and identifying ways of minimizing those consequences. He has also written on occupational safety and health regulation, medical screening, gender inequality, and the legal and public health use of scientific information. Dr. Boden has served as chair of the U.S. Mine Health Research Advisory Committee of the Department of Health and Human Services and has co-chaired a task force advising the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health on research on the social and economic consequences of workplace illness and injury.
Hester J. Lipscomb, PhD
Associate Professor
Division of Occupational & Environmental Medicine
Duke University Medical Center
USA
Work and health disparities: challenges in studying vulnerable workers
Hester Lipscomb is an Associate Professor in the Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at Duke University Medical Center. Trained at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she is an occupational epidemiologist with earlier training in nursing and health behavior. Her research interests have centered around injury and musculoskeletal outcomes among a variety of workers employed in the construction trades, health care, commercial fishing, and poultry processing. Recent work has lead to an interest in the complex relationships between work and disparities in health.
Leslie A. MacDonald, ScD
Scientist Officer
Industrywide Studies Branch
Division of Surveillance, Hazard Evaluations and Field Studies
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
USA
Work organization and risk factors for musculoskeletal disorders
Leslie MacDonald is a Scientist Officer in the U.S. Public Health Service and has worked as a Research Ergonomist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health since 1993. In this role, she conducts field-based research in a variety of occupational settings to identify occupational determinants for adverse worker health outcomes, such as musculoskeletal disorders. Research topics of special interest include examining the separate and joint effects of physical and psychosocial job stressors on injury and illness rates, and identifying underlying organizational antecedents. Leslie is the author of numerous scientific articles and abstracts presented at national and international conferences, and is the developer of an online information resource on work organization assessment methodology (the NIOSH Work Organization Measures Inventory) One of her most recent projects involves a review of practices in the collection and use of occupational measures in population-based cardiovascular studies, which has spurred new lines of research with external partners on the role of occupation in health disparities.
Hilkka Riihimäki
Director
Centre of Expertise Health and Work Ability
Finnish Institute of Occupational Health
FINLAND
Workplace intervention studies for MSD prevention
Professor Hilkka Riihimäki, MD, DMedSc, MSc, has a long experience in epidemiology in occupational health. Her main interest has been in musculoskeletal disorders, those of the back in particular. She has conducted and collaborated in many studies dealing with the etiology of musculoskeletal pain but also that of disc degeneration and osteoarthritis. In recent years her interest has been in genetic susceptibility and intervention research. She has worked in the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health since 1988 as a research scientist, director of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and since January 2006 as the Director of the Centre of Expertise Health and Work Ability. Professor Riihimäki is an author of about 160 scientific articles and book chapters.
Lys Esther Rocha
São Paolo University School of Medicine
BRAZIL
International disparities in development and how they impact work-related musculoskeletal disorder prevention
Lys Esther Rocha is a professor in the Department of Legal Medicine, Medical Ethics, and Social and Occupational Medicine at the University of São Paulo School of Medicine. She has a PhD and MSc in Preventive Medicine from University of São Paulo and is a Specialist in Social Medicine, Occupational Medicine and Ergonomics. Dr. Rocha was a fellow at the Laboratório de Igiene Degli Ambiente Confinati, Istituto Superiore di Sanitá, (Italy) and is an Inspector of the Ministry of Labor and Employment in State of São Paulo.
Her current research interests include: musculoskeletal disorders of call center operators, mental health and work, gender, work and health and prevention of musculoskeletal disorders among hospital kitchen workers.
Jos Twisk
Professor of Applied Biostatistics in Relation to Longitudinal Research
Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics,
VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam
Department of Methodology and Applied Biostatistics,
Institute of Health Sciences,
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
THE NETHERLANDS
Multi-level modeling in the analysis of work-related health problems
Jos Twisk studied human movement science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, and after his graduation in 1990, he started to work at the same faculty, where he joined the research team of the Amsterdam Growth and Health Study. In 1995, he finished his PhD-thesis, which was related to this longitudinal study. In the same year, he moved with the AGHLS from the faculty of human movement science to the EMGO-Institute. After his PhD, he supervised several projects within the AGHSL and participated as a teacher and coordinator in several postdoctoral courses given at the EMGO-Institute. In this period, he specialised himself in the methodological field of longitudinal data analysis and multilevel analysis and wrote two textbooks about it (both published by Cambridge University Press). In 2000, he moved to the department of clinical epidemiology and biostatistics of the VU university medical centre. In 2005, he became head of the department of Methodology and Applied Biostatistics at the Institute of Health Sciences from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. He is also head of the expertise centre of applied longitudinal data analysis, which is an interfaculty centre of the Institute of Health Sciences and the Medical Centre of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. His main activities are statistical and methodological consultancies (both in the clinic and at the university), and teaching. He is also (co)author of more than 200 scientific paper.
Jaap van Dieën
Professor of Biomechanics
Institute for Fundamental and Clinical Human Movement Sciences
Faculty of Human Movement Sciences
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
THE NETHERLANDS
Injury models in observational and experimental research
Jaap van Dieën obtained a PhD from the Faculty of Human Movement Sciences at the 'Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’ in 1993. Since 1996 he has been affiliated with this faculty, since 2002 as professor of biomechanics. He leads a research group focusing on mechanical aspects of musculoskeletal injury. His main research interest is on the interaction of muscle coordination, fatigue, disorders, joint load and stability. Jaap van Dieën has (co-) authored over 120 papers in international scientific journals. He is an editor of the European Journal of Applied Physiology, section editor of Human Movement Sciences and serves on several other editorial boards as well as the boards of the International Society for Electrophysiology and Kinesiology and the Dutch Society for Human Movement Sciences.