Irene Houtman works as a senior researcher at TNO. After her PhD on ‘Stress and coping in lecturing’ at the Free University in Amsterdam in 1990, she went to work for TNO and was involved in many large scale projects on occupational risks at work, often with particular emphasis on psychosocial risks, mental health, psychosocial risk management as well as stimulating return to work. These projects are financed by national and international funds. For the Ministries of Social Affairs and Employment, Health and Transportation and Infrastructure, sector organisations and enterprises,  she lead many projects on work and health in a broad way, or more specifically on topics like psychosocial risks or working times.

A continuous line throughout her TNO career is survey research. Since she started working at TNO she worked on national survey data of the Netherlands (Statistics Netherlands and TNO) like the NWCS and its predecessors, as well as international survey data like the EWCS, ESENER and LFS. She also worked on projects using linked employer and employee survey data like the Monitor Stress and Physical load, Meadow and ESENER (-1). Recently she also linked survey data using multilevel modelling which allows studying relations between variables measured in different data bases, and potentially provided by different sources.