Welcome 2025-26 IPDLN Co-Directors!
Tom Emery, PhD, MBA
Director of ODISSEI
Kasia Karpinska, PhD
Scientific Manager of ODISSEI
Lucas van der Meer
Chief Technical Officer of ODISSEI
Q: What’s your background?
A: We have quite varied backgrounds. Tom has a background in social science and research infrastructure management. He has worked on large cross-national surveys and more recently on computational social science projects that use administrative data. He is also one of the scientific leads of the Pandemic and Disaster Preparedness Center in the Netherlands which focuses on integrated data responses to public health crises.
Lucas has a background in Computer Science and focuses on the design of the broad integrated data infrastructure. He has coordinated the development of the ODISSEI Secure Supercomputer and the Secure Analytical Environment (SANE) which provided secure and trusted environments for large scale data linkage and analysis. He is also the co-chair of the Research Data Alliance working group of Trusted Research Environments as we try to make them internationally interoperable.
Kasia is an experienced social scientist who focuses on supporting researchers in utilizing infrastructure for ground-breaking science. She formerly worked at the Social and Cultural Planbureau in the Netherlands and is now responsible for ensuring that the infrastructure developed within ODISSEI is designed with the primary focus of supporting researchers in policy and academic institutions.
Q: How did you all get into the linkage space?
A: The three of us have worked together for over 5 years now at ODISSEI as it has rapidly grown and developed. We are a small group and work with a federated group of service providers in the Netherlands to support linkage for research purposes. We got into linkage based on our own work. We had questions that we wanted to answer that required different data sources to be linked. Like many in this field, we started out thinking this would be trivial and then got drawn into the technical, legal, ethical, and methodological challenges associated with linkage.
Q: What was some of your early linkage work? What are you working on now?
A: The first major service that we developed was the ODISSEI Secure Super Computer which allows administrative data of Statistics Netherlands to be linked to a wide range of health and social data and then analyzed in a state of the art compute environment. What has been exciting is seeing how this has changed the types of questions we can actually answer as well as the types of methods that can be used to answer them. For example, we are seeing lots of projects that make use of the Population Scale Network of the Netherlands which was developed in conjunction with Statistics Netherlands. It’s been used to study social inequality, the spread of COVID, and the development of dynamic economic models.
Q: How do you see the future population data linkage?
A: One exciting and challenging aspect of data linkage that we are looking at is how we can create secure and flexible infrastructure to support the use of new data driven methods. Ten or twenty years ago, data linkage challenges were dominated by the idea that you had to bring data together in a single place. Modern methods are more open to different approaches such as federated learning and have new challenges such as the need to conduct data disclosure checks rapidly and at scale.
Q: What motivated you to get involved with IPDLN, and what are your plans for hosting in 2026?
A: The challenges that we face in the future of data linkage require global solutions and cooperation, even though the legal and technical frameworks we work in are so often national specific. We strongly believe that the future of data linkage is in the development of cross-national standards and support cross-national analysis and linkage. This is of course not easy, but we really looked forward to the challenge of this and especially collaborating with colleagues from across the globe.