Marlou L.A. DE KROON, MD PhD, has an appointment as assistant professor at the department of Health Sciences, and, additionally, as a professor at the KU Leuven, Belgium. She has ample experience as a Preventive Child Health Care (PCHC) physician. Her research mainly focuses on early life from conception onward. She studies causes, especially Early Life Stress, and environmental and biological pathways, leading to adverse growth and development in the general and in disadvantaged populations of children, especially preterm, Roma and other vulnerable children. Furthermore, her research regards innovations in PCHC improving early detection and prevention.

She has a passion for research on Life Cycle Public Health and DOHaD. In 2011 she defended her PhD thesis: ‘The Terneuzen Birth Cohort. Detection and prevention of overweight and cardiometabolic risk from infancy onward’. She continued this work by obtaining a TOP Prevention Grant (ZONMW) in order to develop dynamic prediction tools of overweight to be implemented within Preventive Child Health Care. Additionally, she obtained several other grants on and/or are involved in other research topics, including 'Early life stress in preterm born children', 'HP4All', 'Transgenerational socio-economic health differences (TRANSSES)', Exposome and microbial pathways of growth and developmental problems', 'eHealth Preterm born children'. She aims at the translation of scientific evidence into Preventive Child Health Care practices in collaboration with child health care professionals, the academic collaborative centers and other partners. She gives lectures to medical and CPE students, supervises scientific internships of both medical students and medical doctors being trained to become a community physician.