Project Coordinators

Marlies Rijnders and Yvonne Schönbeck
Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO)

Marlies Rijnders and Yvonne Schönbeck are the coordinators of GC_1000. They are responsible for the overall scientific progress of the project, the quality of the results and the timely submission of all required documents and reports to the European Commission.

Dr. Marlies Rijnders

Scientific coordinator

Marlies Rijnders, Ph.D. worked as an independent midwife in the Netherlands for 10 years and subsequently became a research-midwife at TNO in Leiden. In 2011 she introduced group antenatal care and group youth health care in the Netherlands. She conducted feasibility, implementation and effect studies of group care and is involved in projects aimed at the development of group care for underserved women, sustainability, content adaptation, monitoring and evaluation. She is consultant for the Dutch Centering Foundation and board member of Group Care Global.

Yvonne Schönbeck

Project coordinator

 Yvonne Schönbeck, PhD, is an epidemiologist, project leader and team leader at TNO. She has a lot of experience with project management (IPMA-C) of diverse projects concerning maternal and child health, including (international) projects on growth and early child development. She was involved as a project manager in the H2020 project MOCHA.

Eline Vlasblom

WP 7 & 8 lead

Eline Vlasblom MSc is a health psychologist and project leader at TNO. She carries out applied research projects to improve the health of young children. She has been leading projects on the implementation of group postnatal plus care (CenteringParenting) in the Netherlands. She has been involved as task leader in several European projects, such as the IMPALA.net project (Erasmus+) and MOCHA (H2020).  Eline Vlasblom has developed several guidelines for preventive child healthcare in the Netherland, such as for sleeping problems, posture and physical activity and height monitoring

Maurits van der Heiden

Maurits van der Heiden has an experience of more than 20 years in the development of medical diagnostic instruments, based on optical-mechanical and ultrasonic sensing especially in cardiology, oncology, nephrology and virology and minimum invasive surgery. He is author of more than 25 articles and 6 patents (h-index 6). He currently is senior scientists and system architect in industrial and medical inspection. In 2014 he developed a concept for integral diagnostic care (BLISS). This concept was successfully piloted in Ghana (BLISS4Midwives 2017) and further improved to a simple but effective backpack (Check2gether 2019).