Academic staff

Get to know members of the academic staff of Applied Data Science.

Dennis Nguyen

Dr. Dennis Nguyen is Assistant Professor for Digital Literacy and Digital Methods at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Dennis coordinates the media courses in the ADS programme and teaches Critical Data Mining of Media Culture and Personalisation of (Public) Media. He holds a PhD in Media, Culture & Society from the University of Hull (UK). His main research interests are critical data studies, public discourses on datafication, digital culture, and empirical methods for media research.

Abdulhakim Qahtan

Dr. Abdulhakim Qahtan is an assistant professor at the Data Intensive Systems (DIS) Group, Information and Computing Sciences Department. Before joining Utrecht University, he worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), Qatar (2016-2019). Dr. Qahtan earned his PhD degree from the Machine Intelligence & kNowledge Engineering (MINE) Lab at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). He completed his B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science at Cairo University, Egypt and King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), Saudi Arabia, respectively. He worked as a teaching assistant at Taiz university, Yemen and a lecturer at KFUPM, Saudi Arabia. His current research focuses on data cleaning, data stream mining, time series analysis, algorithmic fairness and explainable machine learning.

Ellen Hamaker

Prof. Ellen Hamaker is teaching Dynamics and Causality in the Social and Behavioural Sciences. She has a PhD degree in Psychological Methods from the University of Amsterdam (2004). She worked as a postdoc at the University of Virginia (2005), and subsequently joined the Methodology and Statistics Department in the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of Utrecht University (2006). In 2018 she became full professor of longitudinal data analysis. She obtained multiple individual research grants (VENI, VIDI, and ERC consolidator), and currently participates in various large consortia (e.g., Stress-in-Action, funded by the Gravitation program). She has made impactful contributions to the way longitudinal data are used to study dynamics in psychology, educational sciences, and related fields. With her research group she also focuses on how to improve causal inference in the social and behavioural sciences by adopting a strong interdisciplinary approach.