kees boersma

I work as an Associate Professor in the Department of Organization Sciences of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the VU University Amsterdam. I am the project leader of the Amsterdam Research on Emergency Administration (AREA: https://disastergovernance.info/). I work in collaboration with the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign and with Disaster Management Training and Education Centre for Africa (DiMTEC) at the University of the Free State (UFS) Bloemfontein, South Africa. My research is about: crisis and disaster management and governance. I adopt an organizational perspective to understand how people, communities and professionals respond to crisis situations. Since 2001 I have been teaching in the courses Organizational Behavior; Organizational Politics; Organization Theory, Organization and Modern Technology; Crisis and Disaster Management; and Selected Qualitative Methods. I supervised about 150 Master-students and I am/was involved as a co-promotor in 12 promotions.

Project leader project on "Enhancing smart disaster governance: Assessing the potential of the net-centric approach". This project is funded by NWO (The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) in the programme Smart Governance, and co-funded by Dutch Safety Regions (Groningen, Noord-Holland-Noord, Utrecht, Rotterdam-Rijnmond), the Netherlands Institute for Safety, DLOC Police, Cordaid, and Oxfam Novib. I am the project leader and PI and work with the co-applicants Julie Fergusson, Peter Groenewegen, Arjen Boin and Bartel van de Walle.

From 2016-2018 I was Director of the Master's Programmes Culture, Organization and Management (COM; international Master programme) and Policy, Communication and Organization (BCO; national master's programme). As programme director I was responsible for the content, coordination, implementation and risk management of the Master’s COM and BCO, and for the related quality assurance within the framework provided by the Faculty of Social Sciences Board. In June 2018 I was responsible for the successful visitation (leading to the re-accreditation of the two programmes) by the Netherlands Flemish Accreditation Organization (NVAO).

From 2009 - 2013 I was member and Management Committee member (workgroup leader) of the EU COST Action Living in Surveillance Societies (LiSS). The primary objective of the Action was to increase and deepen knowledge about living and working in the surveillance age, in order to better understand the consequences and impacts of enhanced surveillance, and subsequently to make recommendations about its future governance and practice.

From January – September 2012: I was visiting scholar at the University of Illinois in the Department of Communication and the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (I-CHASS) where I worked with professor Scott Poole and professor John Lammers. I did fieldwork at the Illinois Fire Safety Institute (IFSI) and with the Chicago fire service during this period.

Research Manager at the Department Culture, Organization and Management of the Faculty of Social Sciences, VU University Amsterdam

In May 1997 I started on a doctoral thesis in the field of history and technology and I followed postdoctoral courses in social economic history and science and technology studies. My work of these years resulted in 2002 in my PhD-thesis ‘Inventing Structures for Industrial Research. A history of the Philips Nat.Lab.’. My supervisors were: prof. Harry W. Lintsen, prof. Marc de Vries and prof. Arie Rip. It was awarded by the EBHA society wit the best doctoral thesis price.

In 2000 I worked in the history department of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (MD) as a visiting scholar in the ‘Institute for Applied Economics and Study of Business Enterprise’ with prof. Lou Galambos (business history) and with prof. Bill Leslie (history of science).

Researcher in a project on Innovation Benchmark of Small and Medium Enterprices in the South of the Netherlands supervised by prof.dr. Marius Meeus

The Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM) Community is an international community of researchers, practitioners and policy makers involved in or concerned about the design, development, deployment, use and evaluation of information systems for crisis response and management. Website: http://www.iscram.org/