I am an assistant professor with the Utrecht University department of Sociology. The focus of my research is understanding (online) extremism and threats of violence by using computational linguistics. I hold a PhD from the UCL Department of Security and Crime Science. I aim to develop solutions to better understand and counter radicalisation, extremism, terrorism, and other forms of grievance-fuelled targeted violence. I am also interested in improving research transparency within and beyond the field of crime science.

More: University profile, Twitter, LinkedIn, Open Science Framework, Google Scholar.

Brief CV

• 2022-present: Assistant professor, Department of Sociology, Utrecht University
• 2021-present: Honorary research fellow, Department of Security & Crime Science, University College London
• 2021-2022: Scientific project manager, Research and Documentation Centre, Ministry of Justice and Security (Netherlands)
• 2018-2021: PhD candidate, Department of Security & Crime Science, University College London, supervised by Paul Gill & Bennett Kleinberg
• 2015-2017: Research Master’s degree in Psychology, University of Amsterdam
• 2012-2015: Bachelor of Liberal Arts & Sciences (Psychology + Linguistics), University College Utrecht

Recent publications & pre-prints

• New preprint: van der Vegt, I., Kleinberg, B., & Gill, P. (2022). Proceed with Caution: On the Use of Computational Linguistics in Threat Assessment. PsyArxiv Preprints.
• van der Vegt, I., Kleinberg, B., & Gill, P. (2022). Predicting author profiles from online abuse directed at public figures. Journal of Threat Assessment and Management. Author version.
• van der Vegt, I., Gregory, P., van der Meer, B.B., Yang, E., Kleinberg, B., & Gill, P. (2022). Assessment procedures in anonymously written threats of harm and violence. Journal of Threat Assessment and Management. Author version.
• Mozes, M., van der Vegt, I., Kleinberg, B. (2021). A repeated-measures study on emotional responses after a year in the pandemic. Scientific Reports. Open Access.
• van der Vegt, I., Mozes, M., Kleinberg, B. & Gill, P.(2021) The Grievance Dictionary: Understanding Threatening Language Use. Behavior Research Methods. Open Access.
• van der Vegt, I., Mozes, M., Gill, P., & Kleinberg, B. (2020). Online influence, offline violence: Language use on YouTube surrounding the ‘Unite the Right’ rally. Journal of Computational Social Science. Open Access.
• van der Vegt, I., Kleinberg, B. & Gill, P. (2020). Too good to be true? Predicting author profiles from abusive language. Pre-print.
• van der Vegt, I., & Kleinberg, B. (2020). Women worry about family, men about the economy: Gender differences in emotional responses to COVID-19. Social Informatics. Open Access.
• Kleinberg, B., van der Vegt, I., & Mozes, M. (2020). Measuring Emotions in the COVID-19 Real World Worry Dataset. Proceedings of the 2020 Association for Computational Linguistics conference. Open Access.
• van der Vegt, I., Marchment, Z., Clemmow, C., & Gill, P. (2020) Learning from the parallel field of terrorism studies. Journal of Threat Assessment and Management. Link (paywall).
• Kleinberg, B., van der Vegt, I., & Gill, P. (2020). The temporal evolution of a far-right forum. Journal of Computational Social Science, 1-23. Open Access.
• Schumann, S., van der Vegt, I., Gill, P., Schuurman, B. (2019). Towards Open and Reproducible Terrorism Studies: Current Trends and Next Steps. Perspectives on Terrorism. Open access paper here.