All things ACL

My feeling was that I needed to do a PhD project to really impact the way we treat athletes with an ACL injury. I have been an external PhD student at the Radboudumc Nijmegen (the Netherlands) from 2011 until 2019. Being an external PhD student means doing your entire PhD project in your own spare time and with no financial support. It was an intense, but amazingly beautiful path. Not only because it had impact on our knowledge about ACL rehabilitation, but even more because I discovered my own strengths and pitfalls, and therefore learned to embrace my own personality!

The title of my PhD thesis was "Return to play after anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction in pivoting athletes. It's time to reconstruct rehabilitation."
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My thesis describes the complete rehabilitation process for athletes with ACL reconstruction and which measurements to use to test for safe return to sports.
After more than 7 years of hard work, I succesfully defended my PhD thesis on March 14, 2019!

Please send m a message if you want to read a PDF copy of my thesis.

Research in sports orthopedics

I've been working as a post-doc researcher at the Sports & Orthopedics Research Center of the Anna Hospital Geldrop - Anna TopSupport Eindhoven (the Netherlands) since September 2019. The goal of me and my colleagues - orthopedic surgeons, (sports) physiotherapists, and scientists - is to improve healtcare for athletes with instability issues. The largest part of my work still focusses on athletes with ACL injury, but other topics we cover are treatment of athletes with shoulder or ankle instability.

Sharing knowledge

I really enjoy teaching and translating evidence into day-to-day practice. That is why I do many lectures or courses, both within the Netherlands and abroad. Check out where I've been teaching before here.