Niels Van Dijk

Niels van Dijk is an Associate Professor of Legal Philosophy and Legal Sociology at the Faculty of Law and Criminology of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), and a senior researcher at the Centre for Law, Science, Technology and Society (LSTS). He also serves as Director of the Brussels Laboratory for Privacy and Data Protection Impact Assessments (d.pia.lab).

He is the author of Grounds of the Immaterial: A Conflict-Based Approach to Intellectual Rights (2017) and Law, Morality and Digital Ethics (2025). His research explores the legal challenges posed by digital technologies, with a focus on privacy, data protection, intellectual property rights, and legal personhood. His work lies at the intersection of legal philosophy, science and technology studies (STS), and the governance of digital innovation.

Van Dijk's research interests include risk assessments, privacy by design, innovation ethics, data-driven healthcare, techno-constitutionalism, and the ethnography of legal institutions. He holds a PhD in Law from the VUB, as well as LLM and MA degrees in Law and Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam.

He has held visiting research positions at the Centre for Advanced Study of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Digital Security Department at Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands), the Law Department of the London School of Economics (UK), and the Philosophy Department of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain).