AJCF (Auke) Verkaar MSc

Auke Verkaar obtained her Bachelor Nutrition and Health from Wageningen University in 2014. In November 2020 she obtained her Master degree in Nutrition and Health where she specialized in Epidemiology and Public Health. In January 2021 she started working as a research assistant at the Division Nutrition and Health in the chair group Nutrition and Disease. She mainly focused on writing a review about the association between body size in early life (e.g. from intra-uterine life until young adulthood) and the risk of colorectal cancer later in life. From July 2021 until July 2025 Auke did her PhD focusing on the relationship between diet and sleep at the chair group Nutrition and Disease. Auke wrote her own research proposal for this project which was granted by the Graduate Programme of the VLAG graduate school. In her research she combined epidemiology with intervention studies.

Since September 2025, Auke started as postdoctoral researcher in the field of nutrition and cancer epidemiology. She works on two projects. She is involved in the development of a cancer research line for the Institute 4 Preventive Health. Furthermore, she examines relationships between western-style dietary habits and consensus-molecular subtypes as well as immune-cell infiltration in the tumor of colon cancer patients.