Isabelle van der VegtView profile
Assistant Professor
Isabelle van der Vegt is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Utrecht University, where she conducts research at the intersection of computational linguistics, criminology, and social science. Her work focuses on understanding online extremism, radicalisation, and targeted violence through innovative linguistic and data-driven methods. She holds a PhD from the UCL Department of Security and Crime Science, supervised by Paul Gill and Bennett Kleinberg. Her educational background includes a Research Master’s in Psychology from the University of Amsterdam and a Bachelor of Liberal Arts & Sciences (Psychology + Linguistics) from University College Utrecht. She has held prior research roles at University College London and the Research and Documentation Centre of the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security. Her research interests include computational linguistics, online hate, threat assessment, and open science methodologies. She is the creator of the Grievance Dictionary , an open-source tool for automatic linguistic threat assessment, which has been translated into Dutch, German, and Italian. Her publications span journals such as Crime Science , Terrorism and Political Violence , and Behavior Research Methods , with a strong focus on methodological rigor and transparency. Her recent publications reflect a consistent trend in analyzing language use in extremist contexts, developing tools for automated threat detection, and advancing methodological standards in the study of online violence. She emphasizes ethical considerations in computational approaches to security and advocates for open science practices. She is actively involved in academic collaboration, having co-organized a Lorentz workshop on methods for studying hate and extremism online and co-editing an upcoming open-access book on the topic with Ryan Scrivens and Sandy Schumann. Her work has received support from interdisciplinary research networks and is frequently shared through open platforms like Open Science Framework and GitHub. Isabelle van der Vegt is affiliated with the European Network for Open Criminology and promotes transparency in criminological research. She has no listed advisees at this time but plays a mentorship role through workshops and collaborative projects. She is not part of a named lab but contributes to broader research collectives focused on extremism, security, and computational social science.
