Sonja van Weely, PhD, biochemist by training at Amsterdam University Medical Center.
She worked as scientific officer of the  multidisciplinary Dutch Steering Committee on Orphan Drugs, located at ZonMw. Subsequently, she was appointed as senior programme manager involved in several European research programmes on rare diseases (ERA-Nets E-Rare 1-3, European Joint Programme on Rare Diseases, Joint Action on ERN Integration in national health care systems). Representative of ZonMw in Consortium Assembly of International Rare Diseases Research Consortium.

 

Co-creation – a funder/research policy officers’ perspective

One of the goals of ZonMw, the Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development, is to achieve greater impact of the health research that it funds. As a practice-oriented research funder, ZonMw sees it as its public task ensure that (1) the desired knowledge is available, and (2) the chance of utilizing that knowledge is as high as possible. Co-creation with stakeholders is an important step to improve the use of the funded research in practice.