Bio Monique van der Veen
Professor Monitoring in Oral Health and Prevention at the Department of Preventive Dentistry.
Expertise: Preventive dentistry, Cariology, Diagnostics, Monitoring, Tissue optics/photonics (Fluorescence photography, QLF), Community Service Learning, Participatory action research.
Personal interests: Main research topics are oral health monitoring and personalized prevention that focuses on individuals or specific groups in society. Personalized prevention can benefit from the use, at the chair or at home, of diagnostic tools that provide insight into oral health or deviations thereof. Such tools help the oral healthcare professional to detect changes in risk status, such as when caries or periodontal disease develop. And it helps patients monitor their own oral health.
Other means towards targeted prevention are sought through community service learning projects, where participatory action research (PAR) further the understanding why interventions suitable for certain groups will not work for others. PAR teaches how interventions can be created to fit the needs of the target group in order to reduce oral health disparities in society. These disparities are mostly related to socioeconomic position, migration background, presence of systemic diseases or disabilities and age. Mechanisms involved in the maintenance of oral health are studied taking environmental and overall health aspects of specific target groups into perspective.
