Research Associate

Public Health Modelling

Current work and interests

Tabea is a Research Associate at the Public Health Modeling Team of the MRC Epidemiology Unit at Cambridge University led by Prof. James Woodcock, and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Human Geography and Spatial Planning Department of the Geoscience Faculty of Utrecht University under supervision of Dr. Simon Scheider and Prof. Roel Vermeulen.

She contributes to modelling efforts for the UK DARe Hub (Decarbonised, Adaptable and Resilient Transport Infrastructures), and the pan-European UBD Policy project (Urban Burden of Disease Estimation for Policymaking) while remaining involved in the EXPOSOME-NL project.

She is interested in understanding how urban and transport planning structures can improve public health and climate resilience in an equitable manner, and eager to help finding out what works by joining the best available data and models for scenario analysis.

Background and experience

From November 2020 till January 2025, Tabea completed her PhD in Spatial Agent-based Modeling of Urban Environmental Health Interventions for EXPANSE and EXPOSOME-NL under the supervision of Dr. Simon Scheider, Prof. Roel Vermeulen, Prof. Ardine de Wit. During that time she was a member of the Exposome and Planetary Health team at the University Medical Center Utrecht, the Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences, and the Human Geography and Spatial Planning Department of the Faculty of Geosciences. She moreover attained the certificate for the PhD Program in Toxicology and Environmental Health at the Graduate School of Life Sciences.

Tabea she holds a Research Msc. in Urban and Economic Geography from Utrecht University (2018-2020) with summa cum laude distinction. From 2019-2020, she was a visiting student and research assistant at Sustainable Urbanization Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology visiting Prof. Siqi Zheng, writing her master thesis and supporting other research with GIS and data science tasks. In 2018, she was a graduate research assistant at the Center for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University doing network science.

Publications

• Google Scholar
• ResearchGate

Selected publications

• Sonnenschein, T., Scheider, S., de Wit, G. A., Tonne, C. C., & Vermeulen, R. (2022). Agent-based modeling of urban exposome interventions: prospects, model architectures, and methodological challenges. Exposome, 2(1), 1–26.
• de Mooij, J., Sonnenschein, T., Pellegrino, M., Dastani, M., Ettema, D., Logan, B., & Verstegen, J. A. (2024). GenSynthPop: generating a spatially explicit synthetic population of individuals and households from aggregated data. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 38(2), 48.
• Sonnenschein, T. S., de Wit, G. A., den Braver, N. R., Vermeulen, R. C. H., & Scheider, S. (2024). Validating and constructing behavioral models for simulation and projection using automated knowledge extraction. Information Sciences, 662(March 2024).
• Sonnenschein, T. S., Yuan, Z., Khan, J., Kerckhoffs, J., Vermeulen, R. C. H., & Scheider, S. (2025). Hybrid cellular automata-based air pollution model for traffic scenario microsimulations. Environmental Modelling & Software, 186, 106356.
• Beulens, J. W. J., Pinho, M. G. M., Abreu, T. C., den Braver, N. R., Lam, T. M., Huss, A., Vlaanderen, J., Sonnenschein, T., Siddiqui, N. Z., Yuan, Z., Kerckhoffs, J., Zhernakova, A., Brandao Gois, M. F., & Vermeulen, R. C. H. (2022). Environmental risk factors of type 2 diabetes—an exposome approach. Diabetologia, 65(2), 263–274.
• Sonnenschein, T. S., Scheider, S., & Zheng, S. (2022). The rebirth of urban subcenters: How subway expansion impacts the spatial structure and mix of amenities in European cities. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 49(4), 1266–1282.