Rik Oldenkamp’s research is devoted to the development, evaluation, and application of predictive models to assess the environmental and human health impacts of chemicals. He achieves this by integrating concepts, methods, and data from various disciplines, such as chemistry, (eco)toxicology, microbiology, pharmacology, epidemiology, and data science. Through this multidisciplinary approach, he can cover a broad temporal and spatial spectrum, with methods ranging from mechanistic models of bacterial infection at the microscale to environmental fate and effect models of chemicals at the global macroscale.

Rik is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Environment & Health, Amsterdam Institute for Life and Environment (A-LIFE) of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and a research fellow at AIGHD. In this role, he studies AMR patterns and key drivers of AMR emergence at local and global scales, with a specific interest in the role of the natural environment. In 2016, Rik obtained his Ph.D. at Radboud University Nijmegen, on the environmental risk assessment of human pharmaceuticals. He then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University Nijmegen and at the University of York, United Kingdom, before joining AIGHD in 2019 and A-LIFE in 2022.