Principle Investigator, Donor Medicine Research, Sanquin Research, Amsterdam
Professor in Donor Behaviour, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
Eva-Maria Merz is a social scientist with a background in family studies and demography. She is head of the research line Donor Behaviour at Sanquin and Professor in Donor Behaviour at the Sociology department of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU). She combines theoretical and applied expertise within the topic of donor behaviour to study donor life courses and the influence of personal and social network characteristics across different contexts. Her research benefits from her fruitful collaborations within the Dutch Blood Bank, and international scientific organisations, e.g., the Biomedical Excellence of Safer Transfusion (BEST) Collaborative, International Society of Blood Transfusion (ISBT). She has published 54 peer-reviewed scientific papers (32 as first (main) author or last author (Project Leader) in leading journals across various disciplines, including sociology, demography, transfusion research, and social medicine. Knowledge utilization and impact are very important to her, hence she publishes her scientific results open access and additionally in applied outlets and popular media. Her H-index is 22 at google.scholar (08/2021). During the last five years, she has frequently (20+ times) been asked to lecture at various non-scientific events in the Netherlands and abroad and was invited as a keynote speaker several times at major scientific conferences. In 2018, one of her postdocs obtained an NWO Veni grant and another postdoc successfully acquired a Sanquin research grant in 2020. Since 2017, three of her PhD students successfully defended their dissertations. Merz is convinced that supporting young scholars in their academic development and career is among the most important tasks of a senior academic, a task she is utterly committed to.