One of the main objectives of nutrition research is to provide scientific evidence for the role of diet in human health and disease. High-quality dietary assessment methods and biomarkers are crucial to optimally design studies in this field. Nutrition research is often blamed for poor exposure assessment that might impair its usefulness. Therefore, studies that evaluate the validity of dietary assessment methods are important to allow proper inference from such studies. Consequently, researchers should master the concepts and principles underlying evaluation studies.

The course is meant for university graduates in biomedical sciences; nutrition, epidemiology etc. Knowledge of basic statistical concepts and methods (e.g. linear regression, paired t-test, correlation, ANOVA) and study designs is assumed. The course welcomes PhD candidates and postdocs as well as participants from industry and research centres.

The course will address methodological aspects of exposure assessment in nutrition and related fields of biomedical research.
After participation the participant:

• Is able to make a well-informed choice from different methods of exposure assessment;
• Has insight in sources of measurement errors, consequences for exposure assessment, impact on associations observed, and methods to account for these errors;
• Is able to design and analyse evaluation studies, and to quantitatively present and interpret their results;
• Is able to critically evaluate exposure assessment in nutrition and related fields of biomedical research.

For more information visit the VLAG graduate school website.