Donor Cognition
Introduction
“Happy, healthy, and plenty of donors”, that is the mission the Donor Cognition lab wants to contribute to. To maintain a healthy supply of blood, plasma and organ donors, it is imperative that we understand our donors, and that we help donors help us to understand them.
Whether or not a person decides to donate for the first time, or for the second time, or even for the 40th time and how that donation is experienced is the result of a complex interaction between conscious and unconscious individual processes with environmental and contextual factors. The topics of this specific research line complement those of the Donor Health and Donor Behaviour research lines of PI’s dr. Merz and dr. van den Hurk by a focus on how unconscious cognitive, psychological and neurological processes influence behaviour, health and well-being.
The team
With backgrounds in sociology, cognitive and affective neuroscience and artificial intelligence, the Donor Cognition team brings a unique set of skills to Sanquin. Also, the team is partly based at the Cognitive Science & Artificial Intelligence department of Tilburg University.
This allows us to use machine learning and other big data science methods enabling the development of predictive algorithms, or the possibility to develop Virtual and Augmented Reality solutions.
Furthermore, Elisabeth Huis in ‘t Veld will soon complete the Executive MBA at the TIAS Business school. Skills related to innovation, platform development, entrepreneurship, supply chain management and strategy will be employed to ensure that the projects will result in valorization, donor engagements and practically relevant
