prof. Geert Crombez (PhD)

The research of Prof. Geert Crombez investigates the psychological mechanisms underlying chronic pain and health behavior, with an increasing focus on cancer. A central theme in his work is understanding how people can be supported to adopt and maintain a healthy lifestyle, including regular physical activity,  over time.
In the context of cancer care, fewer than 30% of cancer survivors meet physical activity guidelines, despite its well-established benefits for reducing cancer recurrence and improving quality of life. His team develops digital health interventions to bridge this gap. Rather than relying on black-box approaches, such as machine learning models that generate recommendations from data patterns without making their reasoning visible, his team uses a white-box approach grounded in ontologies. An ontology is a formal, machine-readable knowledge framework that makes the underlying reasoning explicit and interpretable, ensuring that recommendations are personalised, context-aware, clinically sound, and trustworthy for both cancer survivors and healthcare providers.
What makes this work particularly ambitious is its design philosophy: rather than building one-off solutions, the team is constructing a modular, theory-driven backbone deliberately built to scale, reuse and adapt. The same ontology-based architecture that today supports physical activity in cancer survivors can tomorrow be extended to other healthy lifestyle behaviors and adapted for different health problems, transforming each intervention from a standalone tool into a building block of a broader ecosystem for personalised health support.
A further hallmark of his work is methodological rigor: his expertise spans the development and validation of self-report measures, causal inference methods, ecological momentary assessment, and single-case experimental designs, allowing his team to make well-founded claims about the mechanisms driving healthy lifestyle change.
 

Geert Crombez is senior full professor of Health Psychology at Ghent University. He has an extensive publication record in pain psychology, measurement science, and healthy lifestyle promotion, and has made sustained contributions to the development and validation of self-report instruments widely used in health psychology research. In recent years he has led interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of behavioral science, computer science, and oncology, bringing together diverse expertise to tackle complex challenges in cancer survivorship care.
 

• dr. Annick De Paepe (PhD) - senior postdoctoral researcher, health psychology
• dr. Maya Braun (PhD) - postdoctoral researcher, health pyschology
• Emma Tack - PhD student, health psychology
• Marthe Van Overbeke - PhD student, Rehabilitation Sciences
• Clarisse Bath - PhD student, Rehabilitation Sciences
• Prof. Femke Ongenae (PhD) - associate professor, Information Technology, IDLab
• Prof. Femke De Backere (PhD) - associate professor, Information Technology, IDLab
• Prof. An De Groef (PhD) - assistant professor, Rehabilitation Sciences
   

• A comparison of in-the-moment and retrospective patient-reported outcome measures in advanced cancer. Supportive Care in Cancer. 2026;34(1):64. (PMID: not yet indexed)
• An analysis of the relevance of the Brief Pain Inventory interference items for measuring pain-related disability. The Journal of Pain. 2025;105588. (PMID: not yet indexed)
• Study protocol for a pragmatic randomised controlled trial on the effectiveness of an eHealth self-management support programme for breast cancer survivors with persistent pain: the PECAN trial. BMJ Open. 2025;15(8):e099241. (PMID: 40846340)
•  An interdisciplinary e-learning intervention for professionals working with breast cancer survivors and chronic pain: a realist evaluation. Disability and Rehabilitation. 2025;47(16):4275-4286. (PMID: not yet indexed)
• Preferences of cancer survivors and healthcare providers for a physical activity application: a group concept mapping study. Psycho-Oncology. 2025;34(4):e70144. (PMID: not yet indexed)
• How to develop causal directed acyclic graphs for observational health research: a scoping review. Health Psychology Review. 2025;19(1):45-65. (PMID: 39327907)
• Development and evaluation of the COntextualised and Personalised Physical activity and Exercise Recommendations (COPPER) Ontology. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity. 2025;22(1):52. (PMID: 40325420)
• Investigating experiences of people with advanced breast or lung cancer in their natural context: protocol for an experience sampling study. BMJ Open. 2024;14(2):e075752. (PMID: 38355197)
• Using stratified medicine to understand, diagnose, and treat neuropathic pain. Pain. 2018;159(Suppl 1):S31-S42. (PMID: 30113945)
• Neuropathy and pain after breast cancer treatment: a prospective observational study. Scandinavian Journal of Pain. 2023;23(1):49-58. (PMID: 35636394)
   

• Lab address: GHPLAB: Ghent Health Psychology Lab, Henri Dunantlaan 2, B-9000 Gent, Belgium
• UGent research profile
• ORCID
• GHPLAB
• prof. Geert Crombez provides these services for other researchers: Digital health intervention, self-report measures, health promotion, psychosocial factors, pain 
• prof. Geert Crombez is interested to receive invitations for presentations or talks