Dr. Laurien Buffart is granted a ‘Bas Mulder Award’

This year for the first time the prestigious Bas Mulder Awards were granted by the Netherlands Cancer Society on behalf of the Alpe D’Huzes Foundation. This Bas Mulder Award – named after and in remembrance of Bas Mulder; who was a living example of the Alpe D’Huzes mission but who died of cancer in 2009 at the age of 24- is a personal grant aimed at “grooming talent” in the field of research that contributes to longer and better lifes for cancer patients. Laurien Buffart will receive her approximately 650,000 Euro grant on the mountain where next Thursday for the sixth year in a row thousands of cyclists will pedal up and down Alpe D'Huez to raise money for cancer research. Last year, Laurien participated in this Alpe D'Huzes event herself with two teams of VU University Medical Center researchers to contribute to the fund raiser. Laurien, who already co-leads the A-CaRe research program to improve cancer rehabilitation at the EMGO Institute for Health and Care Research, will use her award to further organise an international consortium, hire two PhD students and together build an international database of data from randomized controlled trials testing exercise and psychosocial support interventions aiming to improve quality of life of cancer patients and survivors. This database will then be used for a series of meta analyses to better understand why, for whom and under what circumstances these interventions work in order to develop better tailored quality of life improving interventions in the years to come.