Miriam Haaksma was born on 31 July 1990 in Groningen (the Netherlands). In 2008 she finished pre-university education at CSG Wessel Gansfort in Groningen and started her studies Nutrition & Health at Wageningen University. She conducted her graduation project at the Laboratory of Clinical Chemistry and Haematology at Rijnstate Hospital in Arnhem, under supervision of Prof. Huub Savelkoul and clinical chemist Dr. Janneke Ruinemans-Koerts. After graduating in 2014, she enrolled in the PhD programme “Understanding and predicting personalized growth rate curves to aid individualized care in late-onset dementia” (UPPGRAID) at the department of Geriatric Medicine of Radboud university medical center in Nijmegen, under supervision of Prof. Marcel Olde Rikkert (geriatrician) and Dr. René Melis (epidemiologist). During a two-month work visit at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (US), she immersed herself in advanced epidemiological techniques to analyse disease trajectories, under supervision of biostatistician Dr. Jeannie-Marie Leoutsakos. In 2017 she worked as a visiting researcher at the Aging Research Center of Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm (Sweden) for 10 months, under supervision of Prof. Laura Fratiglioni, to make use of the local cohort studies and national registers, as part of her PhD programme. Through her work and her passion for conducting research, Miriam obtained several grants, received a Junior Investigator Award from International College of Geriatric Psychoneuropharmacology, and was awarded the Christine Mohrmann Stipend for excellent female researchers. In the course of her PhD track she supervised several interns, was trained as an epidemiologist, and obtained the University Teaching Qualification. In 2019 she obtained her PhD degree with honors and worked as a postdoc at the Netherlands Cancer Institute Since 2022 she works on projects to improve quality of life and quality of care in nursing homes at the University Network for the Care Sector South-Holland (UNC-ZH) and Leiden University Medical Center (the Netherlands).