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Acknowledgements
I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to all those who walked with me, through my PhD journey. To begin with, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisory team. Andrea, these fruitful 3-year passed so quickly, I still remember the first time we met online when you interviewed me for this PhD position. Thank you for providing me this exciting opportunity to join your team and experience a flavour of the Dutch way of working. You are strict with your PhD students and you always challenge them (everyone knows it!), yet I know that you just want to polish me and motivate me to progress in my research career. Esmee, I miss the time when we worked together in the HARP office, and later moved to our own office with the big lamp and our favourite yellow sofa. I was lucky to have you as my daily supervisor. Your patience, quick feedback and guidance sped up the processes, which kept me going. Carel and Marijke, thank you for your valuable feedback, sharing your immense knowledge and providing me with your continuous support. It was my great pleasure to work with you two. Dank je!
Next, I am happy to have the company of my fellows from the
@AgeAmsterdam to go through the PhD journey together. Keenan, it was nice to have you when I needed someone to talk to. You understood the difficulties I encountered and gave me some good suggestions. Thank you for checking my English for mistakes. I look forward to showing you around when you visit Hong Kong. Anna, we first met at Mirjam’s inaugural lecture. You always gave me a hand, at work and for personal things.
I really like looking at your smiling face and hope it will always be with you especially at the end of your PhD trajectory. Stephanie, I still remember, your first day at the VU was helping me (and PANINI) to order pizza.
Thank you for encouraging me, giving me a hand when I needed it and translating Dutch for me. I treasure the @Age meeting where
we discussed our problems and shared our experience with each other. Jeanine, Arjen and Kira, although we did not see each other very often, I appreciate you responding to my emails when I needed your advice. Also, my other colleagues from the Faculty of Behavioural and Movement Sciences: prof.
dr. Jaap van Dieen, Danielle, Rebekka, Marije, Ali, Roel, Nick, Sabrina, Nina, Jian, Yi Hong, Yajie, Fong, Moira, Jennifer, Solveig, Suzan, Ingrid, Stacey, Annelies, I always felt welcomed to being a part of the department. I also wish to thank dr. Martijn Heymans for your statistical assistance, I learned a lot from you.
I am grateful to the opponents assigned to this thesis, for your insightful comments: prof. Mirjam Pijnappels, prof.
Anna Whittaker, prof. Lisette de Groot, prof. Marian de van der Schueren, dr.
Michael Tieland and dr. Yvette Luiking. I really appreciate your effort to critically read my thesis and contribute to one of the most memorable days of my PhD, the defense, thank you!
As part of my PhD, I had the opportunity to visit the Royal Melbourne Hospital and the University of Melbourne.
I would like to thank the team of the Falls and Balance Outpatient Clinic at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, Melbourne, Australia, including Aileen, Anne, Cassie, Cathy, Daya, Eric, Katrina, Laura and Ross. In the beginning it was challenging to commence the CGA at the clinic. Thanks for all your feedback, suggestions and effort to make the SHAPE study possible. Also, great thanks to the @AgeMelbourne, including Camilla, Christina, Claire, Kwang, Peter and Sifat, for guiding me to conduct research, from an academic’s as well as a clinician’s perspective.
I missed working on Level 6 with each of you.
I would also like to thank all my colleagues from PANINI. We have had such a great three years in different parts of Europe to attend meetings and workshops
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and to organize public engagement events.
I would especially like to thank prof.
Janice Thompson, dr. Carolyn Greig, Evans and Kally for their hospitality and guidance when I had my secondment at the University of Birmingham.
My sincere thanks to my family and friends from Hong Kong. Although I only travelled back a few times, I could always feel your love and spiritual support in these intense three years, which means a lot to me.
I understand that it is too far away for you to attend my PhD defense, but I know that each one of you are proud of my achievement. I would also like to thank some of my former colleagues dr. Mimi Tse and dr. Karen Walton, as well as my current colleagues prof. Timothy Kwok, dr. Ruby Yu, dr. Zoe Zhu and Liz, and my special thanks to prof.
Jean Woo and dr. Ruth Chan. I thank all the above-mentioned colleagues for giving me all the opportunities to explore in the area of ageing and nutritional research, which helped to increase my interest in this field and motivated me to pursue this PhD.
Last but not the least, life would be much harder without you, Pruthvish, thank you for your unconditional support with all the issues I had during my PhD journey and my life in general. I will not forget the sacrifices that you have made in order for me to complete this PhD. You always made time for listening to me, encouraging me and giving me comfort. I also thank mommy Shobha Kanade for giving us the wisdom and courage to overcome the difficulties that we encountered during this journey. O ho oye le.
