International partnerships

International cooperation is fostered through regular contacts with the leaders of similar projects abroad, as well as through participation in international conferences and networks of teams working on specific topics.

For example, teams regularly liaise under the aegis of European projects such as the European Child Cohort Network (Eucconet), which was funded by the European Science Foundation from 2008 to 2013, the Environmental Health Risks in European Birth Cohorts (ENRIECO) project and the more recent European Human Biomonitoring Initiative (HBM4EU), which both focus on the environment, and the LifeCycle project, which was launched in 2017.
These networks provide opportunities to exchange ideas about the best ways of managing longitudinal and multidisciplinary studies, and to develop common tools and joint projects for undertaking Europe-wide comparisons in the future.

Elfe also enjoys close relations with several foreign large-scale cohorts, such as the Millennium Cohort Study in Britain, the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) in Germany, the Japan Environment and Children’s Study (JECS), and the Shanghai Birth Cohort Study in China.