I lecture at the department of Science, Technology, and Policy Studies of Twente University.

snailmail address:
STEPS, Twente Univ.
PO Box 217
7500 AE Enschede
The Netherlands

visiting address:
Capitool 15, room C209.

Latest

Changing jobs
I will take up a position as a lecturer in the department of Philosophy and Science Studies at Nijmegen University on 1 February 2010. (Jan 2010)

Inequality among universities?
On the basis of New Public Management's effects on universities, one could expect increasing inequalities between universities, in favour of the elite research university. We looked at publication output and found the opposite: the elite is loosing ground very, very slowly. Paper now re-written after positive review.
See Halffman & Leydesdorff (2009). (Jan 2010)

Willem's wicked wiki
This site is now running Google's sidewiki. If you have sidewiki on your Google toolbar, then you can leave comments to any part of this site. (3 Dec 2009)

Book Review: Anne Chapman, Democratizing Chemicals
Interesting book about the neo-liberal assumptions in current risk regulation and outline for an alternative. Here is my review for the Journal of Risk Research.
(30 Nov 2009)

The future of chemical regulation in retrospect
In 1995, Roland Bal and I organised a workshop to try and create a dialogue between regulatory experts and social scientists studying regulatory regimes for chemicals. We tried to identify key tensions in these regimes in order to create possible scenarios for regulatory expertise in Europe. Almost a decade and a half later, we look back at the occasion of a new publication that tries to take stock of the current debate around the regulation of chemical risk in Europe (see papers.) (22 Oct 09)

Research

I study how science and technology are woven through society, a.k.a. Science and Technology Studies (STS). I am particularly fascinated by how knowledge gets certified as 'in/accurate' or 'in/correct' at the fringes of the institutions of science, for example when scientists advise policy makers or when scientists are involved with amateurs. (more in CV)

Teaching

Currently, I teach several courses on policy making at Twente University. I also supervise a limited number of Ba and MA theses.
(more on the teaching pages, where you will also find the faq on how to write papers)

Phd training

Together with Sally Wyatt, I coordinate the Phd training of the Dutch  STS graduate school, where Phd students train in a workshop setting.

Currently involved in:

Netherlands graduate school of Science, Technology, and Modern Culture
Science and Democracy Network
CRêPE, EU research project on co-operative research involving NGOs.