ANNUAIRE

In 1999, she started working at Interface Demography at the VUB, where she was involved in the very first project on socio-economic inequalities in all-cause and cause-specific mortality in Belgium based on the Belgian National Database Mortality (BNDM), resulting in a PhD in Sociology in 2005. As a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders, her research on health inequalities was extended to the 2000s.

She participated in several national and international projects on mortality inequalities in Europe an  was/is a promoter of several projects in the field of social epidemiology, cancer epidemiology and environmental epidemiology, with a sociological perspective. As a promoter of the Brain-project CausIneq (Belspo), Gadeyne looked into the mechanisms by which social differences in health are generated. At a time of de-standardization of individual life courses, these inequalities are considered to be associated with the growing instability of family trajectories and professional careers. Currently, she is a promoter of an FWO-funded project on SE differences in cancer incidence and survival in Belgium. Lately, she also started supervising the Green&Quiet project in environmental epidemiology (Innoviris). This project focuses on the interrelationships between green spaces, air pollution, noise pollution and health and mortality in an intersectional perspective in Belgium. In the Brain-project
Helicon, Gadeyne investigates the social patterning of COVID-19.

At Interface Demography, Gadeyne has been involved in the development of large administrative datasets, which consist of a linkage between census data, register data on mortality and death certificates. The BNDM has put Belgium in the limelight and boosted its international position with respect to social research into mortality and health inequalities. She furthermore paved the way for integrating cancer incidence data of the Belgian Cancer Registry into the BNDM. Gadeyne is also coordinating efforts to include in the near future environmental data into this dataset, which will boost the integration of social, cancer and environmental epidemiologic research. Few countries dispose of such exhaustive data and the new data will generate many research possibilities.

Besides her research activities, Gadeyne was involved as a guest professor at Ghent University (Methodology of Social Research), the Catholic University Leuven (Sociology of Population), and the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Démographie). As an associate professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Statistics I, Research Methods for Social Sciences, Social Demography, Social Epidemiology and European Social and Population Issues) she also coordinated an educational project ‘Bachelor of Science in Social Sciences’. This educational joint program VUB-UGhent has attracted numerous students from all over the world since 2016. At the VUB, Gadeyne was the promoter of three successfully defended PhDs and is currently promoting/co-promoting 6 PhDs.

Website: https://researchportal.vub.be/en/persons/sylvie-gadeyne