Patricia Bruijning-Verhagen is an associate professor of infectious diseases epidemiology at the Julius Center for Health Sciences of the UMC Utrecht and clinical epidemiologist at the Department of Infectious Diseases Epidemiology and Surveillance of the RIVM. She is a registered Pediatrician (2008) and Epidemiologist B (2013). She conducted her PhD work on rotavirus epidemiology and vaccination at McGill University and Utrecht University (2013). Vaccine preventable diseases, in particular rotavirus, is the central theme in her epidemiological research. Her research focus is on optimizing prevention strategies for infants and children through vaccination, with a special focus on medically vulnerable pediatric populations. Within an extensive national pediatric network, her research group conducts clinical vaccine studies. Currently, this includes three large multicentre projects focusing on vaccination of infants with medical risk conditions. One of these, the Risk-Group Infant Vaccination Against Rotavirus (RIVAR) project, enrols high-risk infants across 15 hospitals for rotavirus vaccination and evaluates rotavirus vaccine effectiveness. In addition, she collaborates both nationally and internationally with Academia and Public Health Institutes on epidemiological studies of vaccine-preventable diseases. She obtained several research grants from national as well as international research organizations and pharma with a total budget of > 3 million, including a prestigious personal VENI grant. She is currently involved with the national implementation of rotavirus vaccination in the Netherlands and she serves as an external advisor of the Dutch Health Council on immunization.