This is not an obituary. If you were expecting or hoping for one you can bloody well piss off. Because Jos isn’t dead yet. Just retiring. We are of course talking about the one and only Dr Jos Verbeek. Or Jozef Hugo Antonius Maria Verbeek, to be precise. That’s a proper Dutch catholic broadside of first names and apparently his dad’s inside joke, slapping the poor kid with a full complement of the older siblings’ names. This also explains the curiously porky nom de plume J. HAM Verbeek with which he has at least tried to separate work he’s done with and for different masters. Anyway, now I hear the old chap has decided to swap the life of intense academic beard scratching to a more leisurely existence. I fully expect this will involve more pottering in the garden, some artsy wriggling and writhing some people call contemporary dance, maybe the odd painting here and there, and of course for any true Dutchman, the compulsory cycling in the summer and the skating in the winter.
However, before we let him tootle off into the sunset, I will suck a moment of time from your busy schedule with this brief account of my time with this remarkable gentleman. I had the pleasure of entering Jos’ gravitational pull in 2004 when he was on the lookout for a new sidekick. Just the year before he had set up his own Cochrane unit (then known as Cochrane Occupational Health Field) and had followed his heart (and the woman who’d grabbed it) to the mysterious cold dark north known as Kuopio, Finland. And so, I ended up joining his quest to equip the world with the best evidence on the effectiveness of various interventions aiming to improve the health and safety of workers. In 2010 our group got bumped up from an auxiliary supporting actor role to the roster of A-list heavy hitters, i.e. the review groups with the license to ki… sorry… to publish reviews. And boy did we ever! Suffice to say that during our best run our group’s Impact Factor reached just shy of 10.
Here, space permitting, I could list the many exploits and hijinks we got to, travelling hither and thither to conferences, giving courses, making friends and learning all along the way. In many ways Jos is a great teacher in that he doesn’t hide his enthusiasm. Damn if that stuff isn’t infectious! He would gladly share responsibility and so I quickly got shoved in the deep end and learned to swim in the Cochrane waters, first as an author and then as a Managing Editor. We made a great tag team. I was the Robin to his Batman. Capes a-flapping, we rescued a great many struggling authors with their languishing reviews. Problems operationalising your PICO? Splatt! Difficulties with data extraction? Kapow! [editor’s note: the sound effects represent us crushing the problems and not the authors] Jos really showed me how to take the work seriously but not myself.
In the early 2000s work really was easygoing and fun. At best we had team of a half a dozen people (even two information specialists at one stage!) but following a grueling series of government budget cuts, we had to let everyone go, one by one, until just the two of remained. And then in May 2019, we got booted out too. This is where we parted ways, employment-wise. Jos kept the group afloat and finally managed to get it relocated to Amsterdam. Whilst I found new challenges at the Finnish Medicines Agency whilst still keeping my foot in the door of systematic reviews and EBM.
I will be forever thankful for Jos’ guidance and example. He is my Obi-Wan and my Gandalf. Although his poor grasp of popular culture will mean both references will be lost on the poor fellow. Then again, I could have done with a little bit less teasing from his part too. Although, we have a saying in Finnish that it is out of love that the horse kicks. In that sense I’m glad to have been on the receiving end of a good 15 years’ worth of digs and jibes about my PhD taking forever [yes, it’s still ongoing].
Now I welcome you all to reach out to Jos to express the gratitude and to deliver the applause, the fireworks, fly-overs and all the bells and whistles that he rightly deserves for a job well done. Thank you Jos. For everything. Yours truly, Jani
Want to thank Jos as well? Send him an email!
