Isabelle van der Vegt

Dr. Isabelle van der Vegt is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, Utrecht University, specializing in extremism, political violence, and computational linguistics. She holds a PhD in Security and Crime Science from University College London (UCL). Her research focuses on understanding online extremism and threats to public figures through text data analysis, notably developing the Grievance Dictionary—a tool for automated linguistic threat assessment. Previously, she worked as a scientific project manager at the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security’s Research and Documentation Center (WODC).

Her expertise spans applied data science, security in open societies, and computational social science. She has published in journals like Crime Science, Journal of Computational Social Science, and Behavior Research Methods. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Threat Assessment and Management and actively promotes open science practices through initiatives like the European Network for Open Criminology.

Van der Vegt’s work bridges criminology, linguistics, and technology, addressing real-world challenges such as hate speech detection and lone-actor violence prevention. She collaborates internationally, organizing workshops on methods for studying extremism and contributing to interdisciplinary projects on threat assessment and counterterrorism.