I am Professor in Health Communication. I have a special interest in developing health behavior models and intervention development and evaluation, including cost-effectiveness evaluation.

Regarding health behavior models, I am interested in both pre-motivational processes (e.g. the role of risk perception in order to create awareness), motivational processes (e.g. the role of affective and cognitive outcome expectations), and post-motivational processes (e.g. the role of action planning processes such as preparatory and coping planning). Integrating finding of relevant health behaviour (change) models resulted in the development of the ASE-model which has been transformed into the I-Change Model which I regard as a dynamic model that should be able to integrate new findings.

Concerning health promotion intervention development and evaluation, my career started with a school based program for smoking prevention. After my Ph.D. intervention development and testing has included a wide array of interventions, such as school based programs, work site programs, h, community programs, mass media approaches, health counselling methods and (many) computer tailored eHealth interventions. Additionally, recent work involves the comparison of the effects of explicit and implicit change methods.

Most of my work focusses on primary prevention, but during the last decade other prevention domains also gained my interest. My health behaviour topics include a wide array, such as smoking, alcohol, physical activity, nutrition, HIV/Aids, lifestyles, skin cancer screening, participation in screening programs, cervical cancer screening, diabetes II, COPD, etc.

I have been and still am involved with several (inter) national research collaborations with several national and international Ph.D. students and researchers, in Europe (e.g. Belgium; Cyprus; France; Germany; Hungary; Norway; Portugal; Romania, Spain; the UK) and outside Europe (e.g. Australia; Brazil; Canada, Iran; South-Africa; Saudi-Arabia; Tanzania; Uganda and the US).