Dr Kim van Daalen
- BHF CRE Career Development Fellow
Contact
About
Born in the Netherlands, Kim studied Biomedical Sciences (Cum Laude) at Utrecht University alongside the interdisciplinary honours programme at Descartes College. She subsequently completed the interdisciplinary Young Innovators honours programme and began an MSc in Cancer, Stem Cells and Developmental Biology, before changing direction as her interests shifted towards population health and epidemiology.
She moved to Cambridge, where she completed an MPhil in Public Health and Epidemiology, supported by a Murray Edwards College Public Health Award, followed by a PhD in Environmental Epidemiology as a Gates Cambridge Scholar at Newnham College. During her PhD, Kim co-founded and co-led the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change in Europe, an interdisciplinary collaboration bringing together researchers from across Europe to track the links between climate change and health.
Following her PhD, she spent two years at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, where she continued to co-lead the collaboration with Prof. Lowe while working in a highly interdisciplinary research environment. She remains involved with the Lancet Countdown in Europe as an advisor. She subsequently returned to the University of Cambridge, where she is now a BHF CRE Career Development Fellow and Roger Ekins Research Fellow at Emmanuel College.
Her work and academic leadership have been recognised through several awards, including the 2022 Bill Gates Sr. Prize for outstanding research and leadership and the 2024 Barcelona City Award in Environmental Sciences. Throughout her career, she has worked with researchers from a wide range of disciplines, as well as policymakers and multilateral organisations, to connect scientific evidence with broader societal and policy challenges. Underlying this work is a belief that science should contribute to a healthier, fairer and more sustainable world. Kim is particularly motivated by the principle that everyone, regardless of where they live or their social circumstances, should have the opportunity to live in a safe and healthy environment, and that scientific evidence plays an important role in making this possible.
In her free time, Kim enjoys running around Cambridge (albeit not particularly fast), bouldering, hiking and photography.
Research
Kim is an environmental epidemiologist with broad interests in how environmental and climatic exposures influence human health, why their impacts differ across populations, and how this evidence can support more equitable prevention and adaptation. Her PhD focused on environmental arsenic pollution and cardiovascular disease, while alongside this she developed research across several areas of climate change and health. Her work increasingly takes a multi-exposure and exposome perspective, with particular interest in how environmental exposures interact and translate into biological and molecular changes relevant to disease.
Kim has experience across a broad range of environmental epidemiological methods, including longitudinal analyses, time-series approaches, linked health and environmental data, distributed lag and non-linear modelling, and multi-exposure analyses. She has particular expertise in evidence synthesis, including systematic reviews and meta-analysis, and is involved in initiatives that give students practical experience in these approaches. Her work has drawn on a range of population studies, including the BRAVE study in Bangladesh.
Alongside her core environmental health research, Kim has pursued complementary work on equity in global health, including gender equity in global health leadership and questions of epistemic justice in health research and knowledge production.
Teaching and supervision
Whilst Kim's primary work is focused on research, she sees teaching as an important way of contributing to the next generation of scientists, clinical practitioners, policymakers, and other professionals working to improve human health.
Currently, at Cambridge, she contributes to teaching and admissions for the MPhil in Population Health Sciences. Within this MPhil programme, she supervises a small group of students throughout their course, supervises individual MPhil thesis projects, and co-leads the Planetary Health module. She also advises on several PhD projects. She leads seminars on two undergraduate courses: Foundations of Evidence-Based Medicine for first-year medicine and veterinary medicine students, and Social & Ethical Context of Health and Illness for first-year medicine students. She previously served as an undergraduate tutor at Homerton College. Across these roles, she aims to combine methodological rigour with an interdisciplinary perspective, while fostering an inclusive and equitable learning environment in which students feel supported to develop their own ideas, confidence, and independence as clinicians and researchers.
She is always happy to discuss potential MPhil and PhD projects with students whose interests align with her research expertise, or to contribute as an advisor to specific projects
