Dr. D. van Bodegom

Assistent professor, PhD

David van Bodegom studied History and Medicine and started his medical research at the department of Gerontology & Geriatrics during his medical training in 2004. For his PhD research he studied ageing in a natural environment in a rural community in northern Ghana, Africa. This study focuses on environmental, genetic, and immunologic determinants of (healthy) ageing.

In 2011 he defended his PhD thesis ‘Post-reproductive survival in a polygamous society in rural Africa’. In this thesis he studied an evolutionary explanation of our long post-reproductive lifespan. He investigated the grandmother hypothesis, which states that our post-reproductive lifespan evolved to take care of the grandchildren. He found that in Northern Ghana, grandmothers have no effect on offspring survival. Instead, from an evolutionary perspective, the longevity of men, which remain reproductively active in this polygamous society, was much more important than the longevity of women.

Since the beginning of 2009 David van Bodegom is a member of staff of the   Leyden Academy on Vitality and Ageing, a knowledge centre with an education and research programme in the field of ageing, vitality and geriatric medicine. Here, he is the coordinator of the international master Vitality and Ageing, aimed at young medical professionals that want to further their knowledge and skills in the field of ageing. He also supervises two PhD students at the Leyden Academy in their research on demography of ageing, future life-expectancies and economics of ageing. 

In 2012 he published a novel Nood breekt wet (necessity knows no law) on the maintainability of ideals in extreme conditions, which tells the story of a young doctor in tropical medicine that travels to Ghana.
More information on David van Bodegom, his research in Ghana and his novel can be found at  www.davidvanbodegom.nl

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