Tanja van Veldhuizen is Assistant Professor in Legal Psychology at the Criminal Law and Criminology department, Faculty of Law.
She obtained her BSc with hounours in Social Psychology and MSc in Social and Health Psychology (research master) at Utrecht University. As part of her BSc programme she studied a semester at the University of California Berkeley, where she participated in courses on law and society, etnic relations and political philosophy. In September 2017, she obtained her PhD at Maastricht University and the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) within the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate program in Legal Psychology. After obtaining her PhD, Tanja worked as a postdoctoral researcher within the Montaigne Centre for Rule of Law and Administration of Justice at Utrecht University and additionally was involved as research support staff in a study about undesirable behaviour and social safety within the Dutch armed forces for an independent committee appointed by the Ministry of Defence. From 2018-2020 she gained teaching experience as a lecturer in Criminology at Leiden University.
She started working as an Assistant Professor at the Vrije Universiteit in April 2020. She teaches courses related to criminal investigations and proceedings both in the Bachelor and Master programma, and is the chair of the Bachelor Criminology Programme Committee (OLC). She is also a member of the Amsterdam Laboratory for Legal Psychology (ALLP)
