Our Research Team

Frank Takes is Professor of Network Science and Director of Education at the Computer Science and AI Instititute of Leiden University. His research, under the theme "Network Science", is focused on methods and algorithms for knowledge discovery from large-scale social network data.

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 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 is a 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.

Gamal Adel is a PhD candidate in Network Science at Leiden University. Gamal’s research focuses on community dynamics in large-scale social networks.

Katherine is a research assistant in Network Science at Leiden University. She is interested in stochastic processes in networks and is exploring how micro-scale changes can affect network structure on a macro scale.

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 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.

Sara Nunziatini is a Computational Social Science student at the University of Amsterdam and an assistant to the PLANET-NL research group.

Gina Ristani is a learning scientist with a background in educational psychology and physics, serving as the Community & Lab Manager for the PLANET-NL research group. She coordinates joint research initiatives, supports internal operations, and facilitates collaboration across researchers, data custodians, funders, and policy partners within the Dutch and European research ecosystem. 

PhD candidate in Computational Social Science at the University of Amsterdam. He is interested in using graph neural networks to understand and develop actionable insights for complex issues such as inequality, segregation, sustainability, and polarization.

Jomana Abdelrahman is a PhD candidate in computational social science with a background in political science, analytics, data science, and applied AI. Her research blends social science theory with computational methods, with a particular focus on using network analysis to study complex social and political systems. Jomana's interests span network science, social inequality, platform governance, and accountability in computational systems.