Dr. ir. Femke Lamers, PhD

Femke Lamers  (1980) is Associate professor at Amsterdam UMC, VUmc, and program leader of the Amsterdam Public Health Mental health research program. Femke is PI of the PERCIM and INFLAMED study, both investigating personalized medicine options for immuno-metabolic depression. She is also involved in projects using wearables, apps and other ambulatory assessments, such as the NWO Gravitation project Stress in Action, the RADAR-MDD project, the EMA/actigraphy study within NESDA (Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety) and EMOCA study. Her research interests are the heterogeneity of depressive disorder, subtypes of depression, atypical depression, associations depression and physical functioning, ecological momentary assessment (EMA) and actigraphy.

Femke obtained her Masters degree in Human Nutrition with a specialization in Epidemiology from the Wageningen University in 2003. In 2008, she received her PhD degree from the Faculty of Health Medicine and Life Sciences of the Maastricht University on an RCT evaluating the (cost-)effectiveness of a nurse-led minimal psychological intervention in reducing depressive symptoms in chronically ill elderly persons. From 2008-2010 she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow on the Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety (NESDA) at GGZ inGeest/VU Medical Center in Amsterdam. Here, she focused on the heterogeneity of depression, depression symptom profiles and associations between depressive disorders and physical functioning. In 2010 she was awarded with a Rubicon fellowship (NWO) and spent the next three years as Visiting fellow at the Genetic Epidemiology Research Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health, USA, where she continued her work on depressive subtypes. In 2013, she returned to GGZ inGeest/VU Medical Center as assistant professor with the support of a FP7-Marie Curie Career Integration Grant (HETODEP study). She is a certified Epidemiologist with the Netherlands Epidemiological Society/SMBWO.