We were in shock when we received the message that our dear colleague and friend, dr. Jeroen Ruwaard, suddenly passed away at the 16th of July at the age of 49. Jeroen has been an active member of the e-health community for a long time and has been present at the meetings of the International Society of Research on Internet Interventions (ISRII) from the very beginning.
Jeroen finished his masters degree in psychology in 1996. He then worked in the academic field specializing in the more technical parts of e-mental health: creating web-based applications for therapy. Between 2000 and 2012 Jeroen worked for Interapy, one of the first organisations in the Netherlands offering online treatments as part of routine care, closely collaborating with prof. Freddy Lange. During this period Jeroen also wrote his dissertation in which he assessed the efficacy of online treatments for different mental disorders, as well as the effectiveness of these treatments in routine clinical practice. From 2012 to 2018 Jeroen worked at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the team of prof. Heleen Riper. Two years ago he started at the research department of mental health clinic GGZ inGeest with prof. Jan Smit but still collaborating with the VU and team Riper. Next to being involved in many different trials and other studies on e-health he got enthused by working with big data. He was a true bridge between the more technical disciplines and clinical psychologists, being very talented and skilled in both domains and therefore able to understand both perspectives in the highly interdisciplinary e-health domain.
We will miss Jeroen because of his academic endeavors but most of all we will miss him because we lost a good friend. One of his strong assets was his non-conformism. He always stayed true to his self. This sometimes led to debates but these always improved our reasoning. Moreover, he always used his perfect sense of humor to convey his messages. This made spending time with him always so much fun. And last but not least he was a truly kind and modest person. He was always willing to support others. We will miss him dearly.