prof. dr. Lex Bouter

Academic Position

Professor Emeritus of Methodology and Integrity

Amsterdam University Medical Centers | Department of Epidemiology and Data Science | Amsterdam Public Health research institute

Vrije Universiteit | Faculty of Humanities | Department of Philosophy

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List of Publications | Curriculum Vitae

Short Biography

Lex Bouter was born in Rotterdam in 1956. After obtaining an MSc degree in Medical Biology at Utrecht University in 1982, he lectured at teacher training colleges in Tilburg and Utrecht. In 1984, he joined Maastricht University, where he specialized in Epidemiology and obtained his PhD. In 1988, he published a textbook of epidemiology of which the eighth Dutch edition appeared in 2023 and the second English edition was published in 2024.

In 1992, Bouter took up a tenured position as Professor of Epidemiology and became Scientific Director of the EMGO+ Institute for Health and Care Research at the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam (1992-2006). He was Editor (1996-2002) and Editor- in-Chief (2002-2006) of the Cochrane Collaboration Back Review Group.

From 2001 to 2006, he also headed one of the six divisions at the VU University Medical Center. He was president of the Netherlands Epidemiological Society (1996-1997), a member of the Health Council of the Netherlands (2001-2013), vice-chair and chief methodologist of the Dutch Central Committee on Research involving Human Subjects (2001-2013), chair of the programme committee of the Innovative Medical Devices Initiative (2009-2018), chair of the Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development’s Committee for Health Research on Disasters: COVID-19 (since 2021) and chair of the Dutch Research Council’s programme committee for Replication Studies (since 2016).

From 2006 to 2013, he was Rector Magnificus of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In this position, he focused on the formation of interdisciplinary research institutes. As rector, Bouter argued the case for focusing on the societal impact of research and became interested in the dilemmas surrounding research integrity.

In 2014, his tenured professorship was changed from Epidemiology to Methodology and Integrity. Since then he focussed on teaching and doing meta-research on responsible research and publication practices, and became an advocate of Open Science. In 2017, he organized the 5th World Conference on Research Integrity in Amsterdam and from 2017 to 2025 he chaired of the World Conferences on Research Integrity Foundation. In 2022 he formally retired, but continued his scholarly activities on a voluntary basis. Lex Bouter is the author or co-author of 783 scholarly publications in the Web of Science , which have been cited about 107,000 times leading to an h-index of 148. He has supervised 83 and currently is supervising 5 PhD students, 17 of whom have been appointed professor to date.

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