Niels Rietveld, PhD student at the department of Applied Economics of Erasmus School of Economics, was recently awarded the CHARGE Tiger Award “Early Career” at the CHARGE meeting in Los Angeles (January 21-24, 2014). The prize winners of the semi-annual Golden Tiger awards were selected to highlight the work of early career investigators, substantial working group contributors, and overall service to CHARGE.
The CHARGE Consortium (Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic)
Epidemiology) is a collaboration between studies in genetic epidemiology. The Rotterdam Study, hosted at Erasmus MC, plays a major role in this consortium. Within CHARGE several working groups work on specific outcomes. One of the working groups focuses on social science outcomes, and Niels Rietveld played an important role here.
His PhD research is part of a ongoing collaboration between Erasmus School of Economics and Erasmus MC. Together with his supervisors Roy Thurik, Bert Hofman, Philipp Koellinger and Patrick Groenen, he started to identify genetic predispositions to self-employment. His research broadened and currently other social science outcomes such as educational attainment and subjective well-being are investigated as well.
His works resulted in several major publications, for example in Science and the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. Where during the first visits of the CHARGE conference the group of social scientists were seen as outsiders, the Tiger Award indicates that there is now mutual understanding and recognition.
'I am hopeful that the collaboration between Erasmus School of Economics and Erasmus MC continues to be so successful', says Rietveld. The recent establishment of the Erasmus University Rotterdam Institute of Biology and Economic Behavior is a key stone in that process.’