Safety & Security Management Studies - English - Full-time

Bas van Gool is the SSMS department’s chair. He has earned his PhD at Leiden University, and has developed broad expertise in international governance, politics and policy. Van Gool has published on diverse issues such as representative bureaucracy in India, neopatrimonialism in Africa and interactive policy making in Belgium. As an educational and research development advisor he has also consulted with academic institutions and professional organisations in Tanzania, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Belgium. In SSMS he has developed and taught courses in Public Governance, Risk Management, Policy Making, Interactive Policy, Interorganisational Cooperation and Intro to Safety and Security.

Rick Arons has been a teacher for many years with a focus on Spanish, English, linguistics and pedagogy. Originally from the United States he has lived and worked for seven years in Cali, Colombia; seven years in Istanbul, Turkey; and since 2008 in the Netherlands. Arons has been working in the SSMS department since 2011 as a teacher of English and study skills and also as an academic/career counselor. His academic interests are in the areas of first- and second-language acquisition, sociolinguistics, language and gender, creole languages and the psychology of learning. He enjoys his work in SSMS, especially the contact with students and his SSMS colleagues. In addition to his teaching and counseling work, he coordinates some aspects of the programme’s Introduction Week. He can also arrange a “meeloopdag”, a day visiting classes with a student guide, for anyone who is interested in joining SSMS as a student.

Frits van Balveren is a retired Officer of the Royal Netherlands Air Force (RNLAF). During his career van Balveren changed to the RNLAF world of Safety and Security known as Force Protection (military safety and security), in which he occupied several functions relating to operations, as well as education, training, and policy development. Throughout his career was deployed to crisis areas such as Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Later, he became the Netherlands representative for NATO and was responsible for the development and lecturing of Force Protection and Tactical Evaluation policy courses at the NATO school in Oberammergau. He also acted as Military Adviser for the Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague (2013-2014). Van Balveren officially joined Safety and Security Management Studies (SSMS) in January 2015 where he is responsible for Course Development, Internship Coordination, Project Development, Lecturing and Professional Network development and maintenance.

Leonie Duijnisveld is management assistant to the SSMS programme. She has a Bachelor’s degree in office management, and provides secretarial support to the SSMS and IVK (Dutch stream) management team. In addition, she organises the annual SSMS Introduction Camp, the propaedeutic/bachelor’s degree award ceremonies, the annual SSMS professional network seminar and assists in facilitating the group projects.

M.C. (Ben) Leung was born in Hong Kong, and left as a teenager and finished his formal education in The Netherlands with a Master’s degree in chemical engineering. He has lived and worked in The United Kingdom, in the People’s Republic of China, and in The Netherlands. Leung worked both in technical functions like chemical process engineering as well as in organisational support functions, e.g. in human resources, quality management and process safety. He developed a passion for safety management during the years in which he directed production operations in the chemical and horticulture industry. In SSMS he has developed courses in the Industrial Safety domain. Leung is married and is the fortunate father of a teenage son. He enjoys practising the Japanese martial art of aikido, and has been an aikido instructor for many years.

Klaas Voss specialises in the international security domain of SSMS. His areas of expertise include intelligence studies, terrorism and counter-terrorism, geopolitics and national security, and military affairs. Voss studied history and political science at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and at the University of New Hampshire, USA. He completed his PhD in 2012 with a study of modern mercenaries and CIA covert operations during the Cold War. Voss held a graduate scholarship by the American Fulbright Commission and a PhD scholarship by the German National Academic Foundation. He is the author and editor of several books and articles, including his 2013 monograph Washingtons Söldner [Washington’s Mercenaries]. He also worked as a consultant for publications on intelligence services and mercenaries, including the German espionage TV series Deutschland 83/86. Before joining SSMS, Voss worked for several years as a research fellow at the independent Hamburg Institute for Social Research.

Hana Oberpfalzerová is an enthusiastic SSMS lecturer of Research Methods and of the minor course Terrorism & Counterterrorism since 2016, with four years of previous teaching experience at the Charles University in Prague (research methods and psychology of armed conflict). She has a Master's degree in Peace and Development Studies from the University in Pisa, a Bachelor's degree in Political Science and International Relations from the Charles University in Prague,  at which she is currently finishing a PhD in International Relations. Her dissertation focuses on the use of war victim stories in promoting reconciliation in Bosnia. Oberpfalzerová is the author of three peer-reviewed articles and a former holder of a SCIEX fellowship at the Department of Psychology of the University of Zurich. Among her fields of interest are peace and conflict studies, ethnic conflicts, post-conflict reconciliation, transitional justice, political Islam, terrorism, research methods, Balkans, and the Muslim world.

Charlotte Irwin is originally from the UK but has been living and working in the Netherlands for the past 13 years.  Her professional background is in Consultancy, Executive Recruitment, Business Operations and Process Management across a number of business sectors in the US and Europe. Her work has mostly been in the international business arena with extensive experience of international companies and managing international teams. Her work passions include corporate trouble shooting, international business law, education, training and development. Irwin has a Bachelor’s degree in classical archaeology from Kings College London and an LL.M in International Business Law from the University of Liverpool.

Menandro S. Abanes is a Filipino researcher and development worker who has more than 16 years of experience in the field. He earned a fellowship in the Ford-Foundation Graduate Degree for Southeast Asian Development Practitioners for his MA in Anthropology with special focus on development studies at the Institute of Philippine Culture (IPC) – Ateneo de Manila University. Then, he was awarded a scholarship by Nippon Foundation to specialise in International Peace Studies at the United Nations-mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica. In 2010, he joined a research project financed by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), Ethno-religious conflicts in Indonesia and the Philippines (ERCIP) as a doctoral researcher at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. In 2014, he earned his PhD in Social Science. Abanes teaches Sociology, Culture and Diversity, and Research courses in the SSMS programme.

Vana Tsimopoulu is a civil engineer with expertise in the field of hydraulic engineering and flood risk management. She was born and grew up in Greece, where she acquired her first civil engineering diploma in 2008 from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. The same year she moved to the Netherlands to continue her studies at Delft University of Technology, where she was awarded a Master’s degree and a PhD in hydraulic engineering. Tsimopoulou has worked as a consultant/researcher for several companies such as Arcadis, Van Oord, HKV Consultants and Lynkeus Srl. She has been involved in projects in several countries including Turkey, USA, Bulgaria, Japan, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia. In 2015 she started teaching probabilistic design at UNESCO-IHE institute in Delft. In August 2017 she became Secretary of NVRB (Nederlandse Vereniging van Risicoanalyse en Bedrijfszekerheid). Within SSMS she teaches risk and disaster management and supervises theses on industrial safety.

Michael Wilson teaches Economics, Business Administration and Change Management in the SSMS programme. Previously, Wilson was engaged in diverse areas helping to ‘make things happen’ where margins for error were often small and the environment invariably hostile. During the seventies he served in the UK Royal Marines in places such as the Middle East, the North Sea, Ireland and the Mediterranean. In the ‘80s he focused on the offshore underwater construction business, working with major construction organisations installing and maintaining hydrocarbon installations in waters off the UK, India, the Far East and Africa. Wilson advised major oil companies on offshore construction. In the 2000s he started his own consultancy offering specialised services to operators concerned with floating offshore storage solutions. During this period he achieved a BA (Open) at the Open University in the UK, an MBA at Cranfield University, and a Master’s in Business Economics at Leiden University.