After working 17 years for Cochrane Jos will retire from his role as the Coordinating editor for Cochrane Work. Jos will remain part of the Cochrane Work team as editor to complete systematic reviews and provide the team with expertise. That and also spend more time on his second passion in life … dancing (I am sure you did not know this!).
Jos started his career as an occupational physician in the Netherlands, did his PhD at Amsterdam Medical Center, University of Amsterdam and in 2003 he moved to Finland, where the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health asked him to start the Cochrane Occupational Health and Safety Field, which later became the Work group together with ME Jani Ruotsalainen.
Jos has built an extensive portfolio for the Cochrane Work Group that now includes over 70 reviews and protocols. In a field where randomized controlled trials are rather rare and sometimes even impossible, Jos became an expert on including, analyzing and GRADEing evidence from other study designs, such as controlled-before-after studies and interrupted time series.
In the past year, Jos has done an enormous amount of work. After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, he updated the Cochrane review “Personal protective equipment for preventing highly infectious diseases due to exposure to contaminated body fluids in healthcare staff” with the help of a fantastic team of authors within a couple of weeks and it gave direction to international policies and guidelines about how to protect front-line healthcare workers from exposure to the new coronavirus.
Furthermore, he started a number of methods projects based on his extensive expertise and it’s likely we will see some more of it in the near future. Recently, the GRADE working group accepted his paper on assessing the certainty of the evidence when effect sizes are small, but can still have a large impact.
Many will know Jos as a driven person who is always willing to support, plea a good cause, and help others. We know him as an excellent researcher with a warm heart … and ticking away a massive number of papers.
Jos has not finished his quest …. so please join Cochrane Work in wishing him all the best with his Cochrane activities, hobbies and (hopefully) have a bit more time!
