Thijs van Beek is affiliated to the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology at Leiden University as a PhD candidate since September 2025.

More information about Thijs van Beek

Thijs van Beek is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology at Leiden University.

He holds both a bachelor's degree in Political Science and a master's degree in Forensic Criminology from Leiden University. During his master's, he completed a research internship on the research project "Experimenting with perceived safety: A multimodal measurement within a virtual reality environment." This study used a VR setting, combined with self-reports and physiological measurements, to examine the interaction between personal and environmental characteristics. The collected data formed the basis for his master’s thesis, which focused on the effect of social nuisance (i.e., loitering youth) and urban degradation (i.e., litter/graffiti) on perceived/psychophysiological measured (un)safety.

After graduating, he worked for two years as a researcher at Saxion University of Applied Sciences, where he conducted practice-oriented research on cyber resilience and cybercrime. In this role, he contributed to the development of a (hybrid) research lab that used multimodal measurements – such as eye-tracking, physiological data, and serious games – to design controlled and embedded experiments for studying human behavior during cyber threats.

Research

Thijs van Beek's doctoral research focuses on the nature and scope of integrity screening during job application procedures and the (un)intended consequences for applicants with and without criminal records. This research project takes an interdisciplinary and multi-method approach, integrating insights from criminology, psychology, and legal science, and applying a variety of (innovative) methods.