Dear colleagues,

I am delighted to announce the appointment of Gert van Valkenhoef as Cochrane’s IT Development Manager in the Informatics and Knowledge Management Department (IKMD).

Gert has an extensive research background in evidence based medicine, focussing on the development of software to enable new ways of working with evidence. He has a PhD from the University of Groningen thanks to his work on the ADDIS decision support system. He then continued that work as a post-doc researcher at the University Medical Center Groningen.

ADDIS is a proof of concept system that combines a study-oriented repository of trials with network meta-analysis and decision analysis models to inform benefit/risk decisions. Gert's work included methodological contributions in meta-analysis and decision analysis, the development of several R packages, and leading the software development team that built ADDIS.

Gert also provided statistical advice on several systematic reviews, and was a visiting scholar at Brown University and ClinicalTrials.gov.

Gert is excited to be able to combine his passions for software development and evidence based medicine at Cochrane.

He joins IKMD this week, and is currently based in Groningen in the Netherlands with plans to relocate to Copenhagen later this year/early 2017. He will lead Cochrane’s software development and technical architecture in support of our organisational and business aims.

I am sure you will join me in welcoming Gert to the Central Executive Team. His Cochrane email address is gvanvalkenhoef@cochrane.org. 

Best regards,

Chris Mavergames
Head of Informatics & Knowledge Management
Cochrane Central Executive