Annette van der Putten

What is your role within the Academic Collaborative Centre related to people with PIMD?
I represent the University of Groningen in the Management Team of the ACC-PIMD. I am a full professor in Special Needs Education at the University of Groningen. My goal is to develop a better understanding of how best to support children and adults with severe or profound intellectual and multiple disabilities and their families. To this end, we are conducting various research projects focusing on the people with disabilities themselves, their families and the professionals who support them, as well as the relationship between these three groups. My role is to supervise these research endeavours and to prepare applications for new projects. I also lecture our own Special Needs Education students on a regular basis, as well as giving other lectures in this country and abroad.

What do you hope to achieve?
I want us to arrive at a place where we recognise children and adults with PIMD as a group that has the same rights to quality of life as everyone else – a life in which they can reach their full potential and can determine for themselves what their priorities are, to the greatest extent possible. That means conducting quality research, founded on equality-based collaboration with practice partners.

Research projects by Annette van der Putten binnen de AW-EMB

• A hidden problem
• After a while; a study into the sustainable implementation of Programma Perspectief within the support of people with PIMD
• LIFE ID Intervention
• Tailored physical activity
• Moving together – Towards structural and meaningful motor activation of people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities