

Our Research Team
Our team is based at both Leiden University and University of Amsterdam, and has expertise in among others the social sciences, humanities, mathematics, physics and computer science.
The Team
The core team members are listed below. In addition, a number of people from the POPNET project are also involved.

Frank Takes
Frank Takes is Associate Professor of Network Science and director of education of the Computer Science and AI instititute of Leiden University. His research, under the theme "Computational Network Science", is focussed on methods and algorithms for knowledge discovery from large-scale social network data.

Eelke Heemskerk
Eelke Heemskerk is Professor of Political Networks and director of the Computational Social Science programme, University of Amsterdam. His research lies at the intersection of political economy, socio-economics and (corporate) governance. His primary interest is in how formal and informal network structures can change positions of power and influence socio-economic behavior.

Eszter Bokányi
Eszter Bokányi is a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University. She holds a PhD in Physics from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Her work focuses on network science and computational social science, exploring how the structural properties of large-scale social networks can be linked to persistent societal problems such as inequality or segregation. She is particularly interested in examining the connections between urban spaces and social ties in spatial networks.

Yuliia Kazmina
PhD Candidate in Computational Social Science at the University of Amsterdam. She studies how social networks shape segregation, economic mobility, and political behaviour, using large-scale longitudinal data. She integrates theoretical insights from social and network science with empirical analysis of population-scale data to uncover the social structures that shape economic mobility and segregation

Rachel de Jong
Rachel de Jong is a PhD candidate at Leiden University with an interest in computational network science and algorithms. Her research focuses on creating disclosure control methods for network data that take into account network structure. Her work takes place both within the ANO-NET project with Statistics Netherlands (CBS) and in the PLANET-NL project.

Vera de Bel
Vera de Bel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and a member of the Interuniversity Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology (ICS) at the University of Groningen. Vera is intrigued by changes in kinship networks as a result of divorce. In her research, she studies enlarged grandparent generations due to the presence of step-grandparents. In addition to analyzing kinship networks, she also examines the quality of relationships within the family network by collecting and analyzing survey data.
Legacy Projects
The team has been previously involved in a number of other projects in the field among which:

Population-scale social networks (POPNET)
This project was developed by our team under POPNET which ran from 2020 to 2024. Since 2025, the developed digital infrastructure and research community are under the umbrella of the Netherlands Platform for Large-scale Analysis of NETworks (PLANET-NL). For more information and additional resources related to POPNET, please visit www.popnet.io/.

Global corporate networks (CORPNET)
This area of expertise builds upon the success of the 2015-2019 ERC CORPNET project; see the project website for details: corpnet.uva.nl.
The underlying research is particularly focused on how corporate networks provide insights in transparency, power dynamics, and the social implications of corporate ownership.







