Nathalie van der Velde

      Professor Nathalie van der Velde is one of the co-chairs of the steering group of the Global Falls Guideline initiative and co-leading its polypharmacy working group. She is a consultant geriatrician since 2010 and was head of the Geriatrics Department at the Amsterdam UMC, Academic Medical Center (AMC) site from 2014 to 2017. She is currently the principal investigator and leader of the research line ‘person-centered falls & fracture prevention’ at the Amsterdam UMC. Furthermore, she is co-chairing the Amsterdam Public Health Institutions’ research program “Aging and Later Life”. Nathalie is both nationally and internationally involved in activities to improve falls prevention. She chairs the European (EuGMS) Geriatric Medicine Society SIG Falls and Fractures and its Task and Finish Group on fall-risk-increasing drugs. Furthermore, she is co-chair of the steering group of the ongoing World Falls Guideline initiative, and co-leading its polypharmacy working group. She is also a member of the steering committee of the World Congress on Falls and Postural Stability. On a national level, she chairs the Dutch Network of Fall clinics and she is a member of the board of the Dutch Syncope and Autonomic Disorders group and of the steering committee of the Dutch Falls and Dizziness guidelines cluster.

      With regard to editorial tasks she serves as deputy editor for Age & Ageing and associate editor of the Annals of Medicine.

Her overall research goal is to minimize the number and consequences of falls and fall-related injury in older persons. Momentarily, she focusses on optimizing and personalizing deprescribing of fall-risk increasing drugs and optimizing and personalizing diagnosing and treating cardiovascular related fall risk. Her overall objectives are to optimize recognition and treatment of individual fall-risk factors by carrying out clinical and epidemiological research and disperse knowledge on falls research by actively participating in fall workgroups and networks.