Niels is an assistant professor in the European Studies department and co-principal investigator of the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam. Additionally, he serves as the coordinator of the Tech, Power, and Policy theme group at the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies and is a visiting professor at the Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro.  His research focuses on how norms, values, and ideologies get inscribed, resisted, and subverted in communication infrastructures through their transnational governance.

Niels attempts to comprehend how invisible infrastructures shape the socio-technical ordering of information societies and how this influences the distribution of wealth, power, and opportunities.

Niels is co-founder and former chair of both the Human Rights Protocol Considerations (hrpc) Research Group and the Research and Analysis of Standard-Setting Processes (rasp) Research Group in the Internet Research Taskforce (IRTF) , and a veteran of the Internet Research Steering group (IRSG). He served as Vice-Chair for the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (giga-net) and as the final editor of the Tao of the IETF. During his PhD, he was affiliated with the DATACTIVE Research Group at  the University of Amsterdam. After that he was postdoctoral researcher at Texas A&M University and a postdoctoral researcher with the ‘Making the hidden visible: Co-designing for public values in standards-making and governance’-project at the Media Studies department at the University of Amsterdam. For his research, Niels has received funding from the Ford Foundation, the Open Technology Fund, the Internet Society Foundation, the Omidyar Foundation, the Dutch Research Council (NWO), MacArthur Foundation, the Amsterdam Municipality, and the University of Amsterdam. 

Before Niels returned to academia, he worked as Head of Digital for ARTICLE19 where he set up the digital programme which mainstreamed human rights in the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Institute for Electric and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). He co-authored the book How the Internet Really Works, which has now been translated into French, German, Polish, Ukrainian, and Korean. Before all this, Niels designed and implemented freedom of expression projects with Free Press Unlimited, mostly in the Horn of Africa. At the beginning of his career, he helped establish the first community radio stations of Ethiopia. He holds a cum laude MA in Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam.

You can find Niels' personal website here.
If you are looking for an academic-style CV, you can find it here.
If you want to know what Niels is reading, have a look at his Zotero library.