After leaving secondary school I was trained as a medical assistant at a General Practitioner. After three years of training, I worked for another five years in my profession at a Urologist. It was not before 2005 that I started my studies in Media Informatics at TH Köln University of Applied Sciences, in which Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is an integral component of the curriculum. From 2012 to 2018 I was working as research assistant in Media Informatics and as programme coordinator of the master programme Web Science at TH Köln in Germany, while being an external PhD student in HCI at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.
My PhD research focused on Patient Accessible Electronic Health Records (PAEHR) in Sweden, in which I investigated the opportunities and challenges of patients accessing their electronic health records, especially in relation to human values, patient participation, and the doctor-patient relationship. In October 2019 I joined the eHealth group at Roessingh Research & Development in Enschede (The Netherlands) as senior researcher.