Menne van Boven (1991) studied medicine at Utrecht University from which she graduated in 2015. During her Master’s, she became especially interested in children’s health and her interest was further spurred through different elective internships and a study into long term outcomes of monoamniotic twins, that resulted in several oral presentations at different scientific congresses. After medical school, she worked as project manager and teacher at the Utrecht University medical school, and as physician at the pediatric department at ZGV hospital in Ede and the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at the Isala hospital in Zwolle.

Menne van Boven is currently appointed as a PhD student and physician at the Emma Children’s Hospital Amsterdam UMC. She contributed to the development of the Follow Me Neonatology outpatient clinic, to which children are admitted after discharge from the NICU. For the first eight years following discharge, these children are regularly invited to the outpatient clinic for physical examination and to observe their motor, cognitive and behavioural development. Furthermore, parents are counselled on psychological problems eventually developed after the often emotionally stressful admission to the NICU. The newly developed outpatient clinic is part of the Emma Children’s Hospital Amsterdam UMC Follow Me program, an ambitious program that aims to establish multidisciplinary follow-up programs for all tertiary care pediatric patients with the ambition to enhance clinical follow-up, support routine outcome monitoring, and fuel clinical multidisciplinary research to improve clinical care. More information on the Emma Children’s Hospital Amsterdam UMC Follow Me program can be found here.

In her PhD, Menne van Boven will focus on the development of prediction models for the long-term outcomes of children admitted to the NICU. This research uses the information gathered at the Follow Me Neonatology outpatient clinic. With the use of machine learning algorithms, she will focus on improved prediction of long-term outcomes, aiming to facilitate clinical decision making in the neonatal period, improve insight in risk factors for adverse outcomes, and enable early personalised intervention strategies in children at risk of poor outcome.