As of September 2015 Franciska de Jong is full professor of e-Research for the Humanities. From 2015-2022 she was the executive director of CLARIN ERIC, the governing body of the European research infrastructure for language resources which has its statutory seat at Utrecht University. CLARIN has the objective is to provide scholars in the humanities and social sciences seamless access to digital language data and processing tools all across Europe. Currently she is engaged with CLARIN ERIC as senior advisor.
Franciska de Jong studied Dutch language and literature at Utrecht University. She did a PhD in theoretical linguistics and started to work on language technology in 1985 at Philips Research where she worked on machine translation. She was a full professor of language technology at the University of Twente within the Human Media Interaction group from 1992 -2022. She was also affiliated to the Erasmus University in Rotterdam.
Currently, her main research interest is in the field of access technology for digital libraries, text mining, cross-language retrieval, the disclosure of cultural heritage collections (in particular spoken audio archives), and e-research at large. She was the coordinator of the UU initiative Driven by Data (now incorporated in the UU platform Data Science and AI). From 2008 till 2016 she was a member of the Governing Board of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), and from 2009 till 2019 of the Governing Board of the National Library of the Netherlands (KB). She chaired the computational science advisory board of the Lorentz Center (2016-2021), and served on the board of Netherlands eScience Center (2014- 2023). She is a member the NWO Permanent Committee for Large-Scale Scientific Infrastructure (since 2018), the NWO Advisory Committee for Digitalisation Research (since 2023, as chair), the Raad voor de Nederlandse Taal en Letteren (since 2023), and the steering board of Open Science-NL (since 2023). She is leading the work package of Horizon Europe project EOSC Focus (2022-2025) on the sustainability of the European Open Science Cloud.