Software Engineer · PhD Researcher

Currently building data governance solutions at Sendent B.V. and researching sleep-depression relationships at Maastricht University.

5+ years software development · 4+ years research experience · Erasmus Mundus Scholar · MSc & MPH

Current

Software Engineer

Sendent B.V.

December 2025 – Present

Netherlands

Developing compliance and data governance solutions for enterprise environments.

  • Focus on data sovereignty, security, and GDPR compliance
  • Building governance solutions for Nextcloud ecosystems

PhD Candidate

Maastricht University

January 2026 – 2030

CAPHRI Institute

Researching the multidimensional relationships between objectively measured sleep characteristics and depressive symptoms.

  • Department of Social Medicine
  • Research Line: Health Inequities and Societal Participation

Research

Publications & Manuscripts

[In Preparation]

Mirkia, M., Zeches, L., Koster, A., Schram, M.T., Köhler, S., Eussen, S.J.P.M., ... & Meertens, R.

Sleep Duration and Sleep Breaks as Predictors of Incident Depressive Symptoms: A Longitudinal Analysis of Objectively Measured Sleep in The Maastricht Study

Target: Sleep Health • 2025

[Under Review]

Mirkia, M., & Hrzic, R.

Pandemic-era divergence and resilience in EU-27 border vs. non-border life expectancy, 1995–2023

Manuscript under review • 2025

[Conference] – Poster

Mirkia, M., Zeches, L., Koster, A., et al.

Sleep Duration and Sleep Breaks as Predictors of Incident Depressive Symptoms

European Conference on Mental Health (ECMH), Antwerp • 2025

[Conference Paper]

Mirkia, M.

Psychological Aid in Humanitarian Response to Natural Crisis

1st Int. Conf. Psychology & Social Sciences, Babol • 2022

View paper →

Research Interests

Sleep-depression dynamicsLongitudinal cohort analysisDigital biomarkersEpidemiological methodsMental health researchCausal inference

Projects

EU-27 Border vs Non-border Life-Expectancy Convergence (1995–2023)

Built a harmonised EU-27 NUTS-2 panel (NUTS-2016; 240 regions; 6,102 region-years) from Eurostat mortality/population data; estimated absolute β-convergence with TWFE and ran border event-study within countries. Pandemic caused a temporary σ-divergence, then re-convergence by 2023; border regions showed deeper dip and over-rebound.

RTWFEEvent studyEurostatGIS
  • Anchor-2019 population weights; region-clustered SEs
  • Within-country β ≈ −0.0047; segmented σ(log-LE) trend
  • Border event-study: deeper 2020–21 dip, +0.13–0.18y over-rebound by 2023
240
Regions
6,102
Region-years
1995–2023
Span
β −0.0054
Convergence (TWFE)

Sleep ↔ Depression Longitudinal Analysis

Investigating whether objectively measured sleep duration and sleep breaks predict incident depressive symptoms in a prospective cohort of ~6,000 adults over 12 years of follow-up. Using Cox proportional-hazards regression with restricted cubic splines to model non-linear associations.

Cox PHRSurvival AnalysisSplinesThe Maastricht Study

Manuscript in preparation for Sleep Health

Maastricht Deprisk

Independent technical project exploring ML deployment pipelines in a health research context. Built end-to-end system with FastAPI backend and Next.js frontend, deployed on Azure Container Apps. A personal learning exercise in production ML systems.

XGBoostFastAPINext.jsDockerAzure
GitHub →

Independent project for technical learning – not part of official research work

Khaterak (2015–2017)

Co-founded and developed social platform serving 10,000+ monthly active users. Built scalable backend with OAuth authentication and optimized performance by 40%.

PHPPythonOAuthPostgreSQLAgile

Full-stack development & system architecture

Education

MSc European Public Health (Europubhealth+)

Maastricht University • 2024–2025

Erasmus Mundus Scholar (top 1% selection rate)

Master of Public Health

University College Dublin • 2023–2024

First-Class Honours

BSc Psychology

Payam Noor University • 2017–2022

Grade: 17.44/20

Connect

For academic inquiries, collaboration opportunities, or professional matters.

EmailLinkedInGitHub