Dr. Roel Lutkenhaus is a guest researcher at the Department of Public Health, Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam. As one of the initiators of the project ‘Reading between the Lines‘ (along with Erasmus MC’s dr. Famke Mölenberg and prof. dr. Frank van Lenthe) – funded as part of the Dutch Research Agenda (NWA) – he will help to study the influence of the online living environment on the health behaviors of young people in Rotterdam.
Roel is assistant professor at the communication science department of the University of Twente. His work revolves around the transformative power of entertainment media and popular culture and focuses on (1) mapping societal undercurrents in digital media networks; (2) designing, monitoring, and evaluating online media interventions for social and behavioural change; and (3) leveraging participatory approaches in intervention design and research.
Roel obtained his PhD with honours in 2020 on the Entertainment-Education (EE) strategy in the new media landscape. He used digital research methods to map online communities of target audiences in the digital media landscape and advocated innovative collaborations with content creators to reach audiences that had moved beyond the grasp of traditional mass media. These approaches were piloted for the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, the Dutch DNA Dialogue, and the Indian edutainment initiative ‘Main Kuch Bhi Kar Sakti Hoon 3‘ (I – a woman – can achieve anything). Roel holds a master’s in communication studies (University of Twente, 2011), a bachelor’s in applied arts and technology (Saxion University of Applied Science, 2007), and worked for 10+ years in journalism, IT, and marketing – pioneering with data-driven content strategy – before starting his PhD.
Publications list
