Health is about more than the medical aspect

Jean-Pierre Van geertruyden is a professor of medicine at UAntwerp and cofounder and coordinator of the Global Health Institute. After spending years working in humanitarian aid, as part of which he travelled all over the world, he settled down in Antwerp at age 39 to start a doctorate. This would prove to be the start of an impressive academic career. Van geertruyden sat down with Stroom to tell us about the extraordinary path he’s taken and the advantages and disadvantages of getting off to a late start in the research world. 

Travelling and lifelong learning 

Van geertruyden’s professional career reads like an adventure novel, including a number of surprising plot twists. After his medicine studies, he joined the navy and spent three years going on missions as a medical officer. ‘It was the perfect first job for me,’ he says, ‘because I’d always loved travelling.’  

After that, he started working in humanitarian aid. In retrospect, this first career switch wasn’t all that surprising: ‘During my studies, I had visited Congo, where I really saw the added value of my work. That experience even inspired me to enrol in a postgraduate programme in tropical medicine. So it was only a matter of time before I’d end up in this sector.’ On behalf of the World Health Organization and Médecins Sans Frontières, Van geertruyden delivered clinical and humanitarian aid in countries such as Burundi, Burkina Faso, Rwanda, Guinea, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bosnia. ‘Short missions would take a few months, during which I worked 24/7. In between I’d have a period of rest in Belgium, with my family. On the longer missions, during which I’d sometimes spend more than a year abroad, my family would join me.’ The impact on his family life went beyond the relocations. Following one mission, the family adopted a child whose parents had died in the civil war in Liberia and Sierra Leone. In the end, it was also for family reasons that he decided to permanently return to Belgium, says Van geertruyden. ‘In 2004, I had had a career of over a decade in the humanitarian field. My eldest children were early teenagers, and I wanted to give them the chance to settle here.’ 

Right around that time, an opportunity came up at the Institute of Tropical Medicine. This is how Van geertruyden, at age 39, started a research project on malaria, which soon turned into a doctorate. Another career switch, and this time not to a field he had been eying for a while: ‘The opportunity presented itself to me by sheer chance, I didn’t know the first thing about the world of research. But the switch did make sense, in a way, because I’m not just passionate about travelling but also about lifelong learning. From that perspective, a doctorate is perfect of course.’ 

An academic blitz career

In 2007, Van geertruyden completed his doctorate at the age of 42. After that, he moved up the ranks of the University of Antwerp with lightning speed, starting out as a postdoctoral researcher and ending up as a full professor. Getting one’s academic career off to a late start has its advantages and disadvantages, he says. ‘Sometimes the thought occurs to me that I, had I chosen this path at an earlier stage, would have been where I am today at a younger age. I feel like I’m only reaching my cruising speed now, with my retirement already somewhat looming in the distance.’ (laughs) But he’s quick to put this disadvantage in perspective, as his intensive experience in the field also contributed to his academic blitz career. He therefore sees practical experience as a giant plus for starting academics. ‘You acquire skills you miss out on in a purely academic setting. You’re rooted in the real world and learn other ways of working and taking decisions. What’s more, you’re already building a network. All in all, you’re ideally placed to then go into research.’ 

Research and education in global health 

When Van geertruyden started out at UAntwerp, he quickly noticed that something was missing: someone to properly coordinate international (and particularly non-European) collaborations. This is why he founded the Global Health Institute together with professors Annelies Van Rie and Robert Colebunders. ‘The GHI is a research centre with the mission of improving global health. To this end, we actively seek international collaborations, especially with the South, based on the three core tasks of UAntwerp: research, education and service to society.’ In concrete terms, the GHI has research topics focusing on global health issues such as malaria, tuberculosis, the nodding disease, antibiotics resistance, cervical cancer, hypertension and diabetes, and vaccinable diseases including Ebola and mpox. The centre’s staff work on these topics on an international level: ‘We exchange local solutions and learn from one another. This is how we build expertise, both here and abroad. It’s a fruitful cross-fertilisation!’ What’s more, almost all of the research projects are multidisciplinary in nature. ‘This is important,’ Van geertruyden says, ‘because health and healthcare are about more than just the medical aspect. Our projects have medical and laboratory components, but also anthropological and biological ones. Take our malaria research, for instance. It takes quite some statistic modelling and molecular biology to map out how the parasite is spreading. And our anthropologists and sociologists, in turn, study the way people look at the disease and the vaccine.’

In addition to research, GHI also plays an important part in education. There are, for example, grants for students from the South to come to UAntwerp, as well as collaborations with local study programmes around the world. Van geertruyden was also one of the founders of an English-taught advanced master programme in global health: ‘That advanced master is a unique collaboration between five Flemish universities. Students can take courses at all of the institutes. And what’s also unique, is the emphatic multidisciplinary nature of the programme. Whereas other master programmes in global health have a strong (bio)medical focus, 80% of our students have a different prior education, such as law or sociology. This is another conscious choice on our part, motivated by health not just being about medicine. It’s a vision reflected by both the courses and the student population in this master!’