Students

PhD students

I currently supervise two PhD students at the ICAI OpenGov Lab:

Damiaan Reijnaers

Damiaan works on Advanced NLP for Open Government, focusing on explainable document representations. Damiaan is a dual PhD candidate and also works as an advisor at the organization for information management and the government of the Netherlands. Damiaan holds an MSc AI degree from UvA.

damiaan.nl

Maik Larooij

Maik works on Advanced Search for Open Government. Co-supervised with Maarten Marx. Maik built WooGLe before joining the OpenGov Lab. Maik is a dual PhD candidate and works as an advisor at the organization for information management and the government of the Netherlands. Maik holds an MSc Computer Science joint degree from UvA/VU.

maiklarooij.nl

Bachelor and Master students

I currently supervise:

  • Robert van Straten (MSc Computer Science, UvA/VU)
  • Alyson Ranucci (MSc Computer Science, UvA/VU)
  • Lisa Saleh (MSc Artificial Intelligence, UvA)
  • Margarita Petrova (MSc Computational Science, UvA/VU)
  • Alexandra Holikova (MSc Data Science, UvA)
  • Tessa van Hooft (MSc Information Studies, UvA)

Alumni

  • Kaan Sert (2025, BSc) — Hidden Silence: Measuring Omission Bias in GPT-Based Summarisation of Ministerial Speeches. BSc AI, UvA.
  • Mark Broerse (2025, BSc) — A BERT-Based Sentiment Analysis On Dutch Parliament Debates. BSc AI, UvA.
  • Niels Barnhoorn (2025, BSc) — Synthetic WorgBERT for FgNER on OpenGov Documents. BSc Information Science, UvA.

I’ve supervised MSc thesis students across VU Amsterdam, UvA, Leiden University, Radboud University, and during my time at FD Mediagroep and Randstad. Several of these theses led to publications at peer-reviewed venues.

  • Oberon Berlage (2019, MSc) — Audio embeddings for radio show segmentation. Published at ICASSP 2020.
  • Anna Lőrincz (2022, MSc) — Multilingual vacancy text generation. Published at GEM Workshop (EMNLP) 2022.
  • Adam Arafan (2022, MSc) — Bias mitigation in candidate recommenders. Published at RecSys in HR 2022.
  • Sarah-Jane van Els (2022, MSc) — Synthetic data for fairness assessments. Published at CompJobs 2022.
  • Ninande Vermeer (2022, MSc) — Skill extraction from Dutch job descriptions. Published at CompJobs 2022.
  • Benjamin Platten (2022, MSc) — Personnel scheduling with RL and GNNs. Published at RecSys in HR 2022.
  • Yuxin Luo (2023, MSc) — Resume content extraction with T5. Published at RecSys in HR 2023.
  • Spyros Avlonitis (2023, MSc) — Career path recommendations with RL. Published at RecSys in HR 2023.
  • Lois Rink (2024, MSc) — Aspect-based sentiment analysis for HR surveys. Published at NLP4HR 2024.

Interested in doing your thesis with me? Check out the OpenGov Lab for current opportunities, or reach out directl