Monique Breteler
Monique Maria Bernadette Breteler (born 26 January 1961, Nijmegen) is a Dutch neuroepidemiologist. She is Director of Population Health Sciences at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), Professor of Population Health Sciences at the University of Bonn, and Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. She has been a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2015. Academic career Breteler received her medical degree from the University of Nijmegen (1987) and her PhD degree in epidemiology from the Erasmus University Rotterdam (1993). She joined the Department of Epidemiology at Erasmus University Rotterdam in 1989 to develop the neurologic component in the Rotterdam Study, a large cohort study on chronic diseases in the elderly. From 1995 to 2011 she was head of the neuroepidemiology section of the department, where she was the primary investigator for neurological diseases of the Rotterdam Study and initiated the Rotterdam Scan Study. Her work in the Rotterdam Scan Study led to important insights about Alzheimer's disease, in particular the role of lifestyle factors, metabolic disorders, inflammation, and vascular mechanisms. Since 2011 she is Director of Population Health Sciences at the German Center for