I am a professor in the field of socioeconomic and psychosocial determinants of poor health outcomes. With a background in sociology and methodology (graduated in 1989), I have a longtime interest in social inequalities. I have an advanced experience in and knowledge of large-scale longitudinal research with state-of-the-art methodologies. My PhD thesis, using data from one of the first large-scale epidemiological studies in both The Netherlands and Lithuania (then under Soviet reign), reports on socioeconomic and psychosocial risk factors of coronary heart disease. After my PhD thesis (1994), I broadened my experience with longitudinal research at Statistics Netherlands where I looked at inequalities in educational careers. Between 1995 and 1999, I worked at the two prestigious research institutes in the field of socioeconomic inequalities in health: Professor Marmot’s group in London and Professor Mackenbach’s group in Rotterdam. In these workplaces, I studied job control and psychological characteristics in their relation to health inequalities.Working at the Neuropsychology department at the Maastricht Unviersity, I extended my experiences by studying cognitive and successful aging, with a particular focus on social determinants. In 2001, I joined the group of Medical Sociology (later Social Medicine), where I have been involved in both supervision of PhD students in the field of public health and education (social medicine internships and public health). I have been a program leader and a vice chair of one of the research programs of research school CAPHRI. I published several times in The Lancet and the British Medical Journal, as well as in other high-impact journals in the field of public health and social medicine (e.g. American Journal of Public Health and American Journal of Epidemiology). I am an associate editor for Social Science & Medicine, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, BMC Public Health, and BMC Research Notes.