CHARGE Tiger Award for Niels Rietvelds

Niels Rietveld, PhD student at the department of Applied Economics of the Erasmus School of Economics, was recently awarded the CHARGE Tiger Award "Early Career" at the CHARGE meeting in Los Angeles (January 21- 24, 2014). The prize winners of the semi-annual Golden Tiger awards were selected to highlight the work of early career investigators, substantial working group contributors, and overall service to CHARGE.

The CHARGE Consortium (Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology) is a collaboration between studies in genetic epidemiology. The Rotterdam Study, hosted at the Erasmus Medical Center, plays a major role in this consortium. Within CHARGE several working group work on specific outcomes. One of the working groups focuses on social science outcomes, and Niels played an important role here.

His PhD research is part of a ongoing collaboration between the Erasmus School of Economics and the Erasmus Medical Center. Together with his supervisors - Roy Thurik, Bert Hofman, Philipp Koellinger and Patrick Groenen - he started to identify genetic predispositions to self- employment. His research broadened and currently other social science outcomes such as educational attainment and subjective well-being are investigated as well.

His works resulted in several major publications, for example in > Science and the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. Where during the first visits of the CHARGE conference the group of social scientists were seen as outsiders, the Tiger Award indicates that there is now mutual understanding and recognition.

'We are hopeful that the collaboration between the Erasmus School of Economics and the Erasmus Medical Center continues to be so successful', says Niels. The recent establishment of the Erasmus University Rotterdam Institute of Biology and Economic Behavior is a key stone in that process. .