Niki Lijftogt MD, PhD

Niki Lijftogt was born in Soest, in the Netherlands, on April 7th, 1986. She graduated from the Baarnsch Lyceum in Baarn in 2004 and started studying medicine at Utrecht University that same year.

At the start of her study, Niki became a member of the student's rowing club U.S.R. Triton, where she was a fresh-year cox swan and had the privilege of winning the Varsity, an important national rowing regatta. In the following years being a cox swan in a rowing team was replaced by leading sports classes as one of her favorite activities. Next to her internships, the sports classes were an ultimate performance but rendered energy the most.

When Niki received her doctoral degree in 2011 she started working as an intern, not in training, at the department of surgery at the Sint Antonius Hospital in Nieuwegein. Following, she started as a Ph.D. student at the Dutch Institute for Clinical Auditing, working on Quality of Care in Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Surgery. Meanwhile, epidemiology became one of her special interests with an always-present curiosity leading to the current chapters in this manuscript.

Then, after several months of working again in the surgical clinical field of the OLVG in Amsterdam, Niki decided to switch to dermatology and started working at the STI clinic at the GGD in Amsterdam. Since the end of 2017, she has been working as an intern, not in training, at the department of dermatology, and now resides in Rotterdam, which is the perfect setting to further develop her skills in dermatology.