Veerle Buffel

Since October 2023, Veerle Buffel has been an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at VUB. She studied sociology at Ghent University, where she also completed a PhD (2016) and postdoctoral research (2019) on the mental health impact of the economic crisis and the medicalization of precarious work from a macro-sociological perspective. Following this, Veerle worked as a research leader in Health Economics at HIVA (KUL) and as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp, contributing to national and international projects focused on equal access to care, integrated chronic care, and sexual preventive health. She also served as the principal investigator for the international Covid-19 student well-being study.

Since 2022, Veerle has been a co-founder of Data4PHM, an interdisciplinary consortium of researchers (from UA, KUL, and VUB) and data owners (IMA, Sciensano, Pharmaflux) aimed at supporting population health management in Belgium.

Her research is situated at the intersection of health sociology and the sociology of social inequalities and inclusion. Using a variety of data sources, Veerle explores social inequalities in health and healthcare utilization, with a focus on the role of structural factors and normative frameworks. Her work primarily addresses mental health, chronic diseases, and sexual and reproductive health. To better understand social inequalities in health and promote more inclusive healthcare, her research increasingly emphasizes the social dimensions of migration status and ethnicity.

Currently, Veerle is the principal investigator of the Medimig project ("MEDical decision-making in MIGrant populations within a super-diverse society"), which examines the diverse personal and cultural preferences toward medical decision-making among patients from various ethnic minority groups. Additionally, she supervises the New Voices project, which aims to collect data from, and in collaboration with, newly arrived migrants in Belgium using a web-based respondent-driven sampling method. This project gathers information about their health, work, and living conditions, as well as their sense of belonging, social networks, media use, and experiences with discrimination, linking these diverse research topics.

Research keywords: Mental health, medicalization, chronic care, sexual health, health inequalities, migration health, culture-sensitive care, stigma research, and social norms.