New colleague Joanne Leerlooijer joins ELS

My name is Joanne Leerlooijer, and I am working as education coordinator for the ELS group (in collaboration with Carla Oonk).

After completing my masters in ‘Health Promotion and Health Education’, and ‘Mental Health Sciences’ in Maastricht, I worked for 9 years as researcher and trainer in the international program of Rutgers (Dutch centre for sexuality). My main task was to train and collaborate with organizations in Africa and Asia, on the design of school-based sexuality education/ HIV prevention programs. In this period I also established and volunteered for the Adopteer een Geit (Adopt a Goat) foundation, that resulted from my Master thesis research in Uganda. With this foundation we supported more than 2200 unmarried teenage mothers in Uganda (with a goat and many other things).

Based on research at Rutgers and at Adopteer een Geit, I wrote my dissertation and obtained my PhD in 2013 in Maastricht. A key element of my dissertation was the use of Intervention Mapping, a framework to systematically plan health promotion interventions. An approach that has quite some similarities with frameworks related to planning and development of education.

In 2012 I started working at WUR and have been working here for 10 years. 5 years as postdoc at the Division of Human Nutrition, where I was involved in the development of a distance learning master programme. And 5 years as education coordinator and lecturer at Strategic Communication (COM) and Knowledge Technology and Innovation (KTI). Between these two positions I worked as lecturer at Archimedes Institute (Hogeschool Utrecht).

In addition to my work as ELS education coordinator I am also still involved in research and education of COM & KTI and WUR. I am ACT coach, supervise BSc and MSc thesis students, coordinate a BSc course on Intervention Mapping, and I am daily supervisor of a PhD candidate in Uganda. I am also involved in a working group on BSc skills, with a focus on personal leadership and reflection skills.