Victor van der Geest

Victor van der Geest is an Associate Professor in Criminology at the Faculty of Law, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is affiliated with A-LAB and the Empirical and Normative Studies research program. His work focuses on life-course criminology, criminal careers, and the interplay between employment and criminal behavior.

• PhD in Criminology, VU Amsterdam (2011)
• MA in Developmental Psychology, Universiteit Leiden (2005)

His research interests include the developmental trajectories of offenders, desistance from crime, white-collar and organized crime, and intergenerational patterns of vulnerable parenting. He employs quantitative methods such as trajectory modeling and fixed-effects analysis, and works extensively with population-level microdata.

His recent publications focus on longitudinal patterns of organized crime offenders, cross-national comparisons of criminal careers, and the role of financial independence in desistance. These works reflect a strong emphasis on policy-relevant, empirically grounded criminological research.

• Junior societal impact award (2011)
• FSR Teaching Prize (2013)

Victor has supervised four PhD theses and teaches advanced research methods and statistics in criminology. He leads major longitudinal projects such as the 17Up and IN-CARE studies, which investigate life outcomes of institutionalized youth and intergenerational adversity, respectively. His work bridges developmental psychology and criminology, contributing significantly to both theory and practice in criminal justice.