We are delighted to share the news that our Health CASCADE research fellow, Dr. Vinayak Anand-Kumar, successfully defended his PhD thesis at Constructor University Bremen, Germany, on Thursday, 23rd January 2025.
His thesis, titled “Applying co-creation to develop behaviour change interventions: Analysing the design, build and evaluation of digital health interventions,” was highly appreciated by the five reviewers and the committee consisting of Prof. Dr. Margrit Schreier, Prof. Dr. Maria Giné Garriga, Dr. Martina Schmiedhofer and Dr. Dimitra Pappa, as well as Prof. Dr. Sonia Lippke acting as chair.
The dissertation by Vinayak Anand-Kumar provided insight into co-creation methods from an applied perspective. He conducted several studies, starting from designing co-creation research, recruiting co-creators and other aspects related to planning such work, how to actually conduct such research, up to evaluating and aggregating diverse data including qualitative and quantitative methods. The research questions investigated were based on rationales from public health, health psychology and empirical methods. The thesis consists of a general introduction and a summarizing discussion as well as five empirical studies, starting out with a focus on the healthcare system and digital health interventions, DHI, aka dHealth. The thesis also investigated important aspects relating to health behavior change and study adherence, i.e. how to deal with missing data and predicting clinical outcomes and costs of treatment. The thesis was well grounded in different theories such as Empowerment Theory. Vinayak Anand-Kumar retrieved important findings and concluded with implications for future research.
During the defense, a large group of fellows and consortium colleagues attended the presentation and Q&A session, and provided emotional support, as they had been doing during the last three years.
Now, it is the time to wish him every success with his future and that his findings will improve the science and practice of co-creation.
Congratulations once again, Vinny! We are very happy together with you.
