Biography

Judith Rijnhart, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the College of Public Health. Before joining the College of Public Health, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Amsterdam University Medical Center in the Netherlands. Dr. Rijnhart has an interdisciplinary background and holds degrees in Nursing, Prevention and Public Health, and Epidemiology. In 2018, Dr. Rijnhart was awarded a Fulbright grant to visit Dr. David MacKinnon’s Research in Prevention Laboratory at the Department of Psychology of Arizona State University. Dr. Rijnhart obtained a Senior Teaching Qualification in 2022 and has experience in the teaching, mentoring, and advising of undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students.

Dr. Rijnhart’s research is focused on the evaluation and application of methods for statistical mediation analysis. Mediation analysis can be used to investigate the causal mechanisms that underlie exposure and intervention effects and is increasingly being used in the field of Public Health. Dr. Rijnhart’s methodological research is focused on the development and evaluation of methods for mediation analysis. She has (co-)authored multiple papers on methods for the analysis of mediation models with binary variables and longitudinal mediation analysis. In addition, Dr. Rijnhart is interested in the application of mediation analysis to understand what factors cause and sustain health disparities in cognitive aging. To this end, Dr. Rijnhart has co-authored various papers in which mediation analysis was applied to gain insight into the causal mechanisms underlying health disparities and (cognitive) health outcomes in older adults.