Dr Mindel van de Laar (M.M.)

Dr. Mindel van de Laar is PhD director of the dual career PhD programme in Governance and Policy Analysis (GPAC2)  of UNU-MERIT / Maastricht Graduate School of Governance, Maastricht University.  The programme hosts on average 50 part time PhD fellows, and offers workshops, and supervision services. The directorship activities include development of the educational programme, supervision of the first year PhD fellows in drafting their research proposals and following progress of the higher year fellows once content supervisors are assigned. 

In addition, she manages a selection of research and training projects, including:

The Evidence-Based Policy Research Methods (EPRM) course, a programme designed with a blended learning concept, to allow working professionals to set their  first steps in research design alongside their jobs.

The Community of Learning for Africa project (COLA), a project developed to assess the needs for research and feedback support of researchers and PhD fellows in Africa. The project aims to develop a network and platform with services to be offered to the research communities in Africa interested in similar topics as UNU-MERIT / MGSOG are working on.

She also coordinates the input of our course in Public Policy offered in the Master of Science in Social Protection, offered in coop­er­a­tion with Hei­del­berg Uni­ver­si­ty, Ger­many, the Nation­al Eco­nom­ics Uni­ver­si­ty, Viet­nam and Uni­ver­si­tas Indone­sia, Indone­sia. http://master-social-protection.com/

Mindel van de Laar supervises master and PhD fellows with topics in the field of decision making and higher education and capacity building. She offers PhD education in research methods. She is institutional representative in the Association for Public Policy and Management (APPAM).

Mindel is also trained as Co-active life coach (The coaches, CTI). She is actively involved as coach for PhD fellows, enrolled in an individual coaching track, and for master student enrolled via the Premium project (UM).

Mindel holds a PhD in economics and a MSc in International Economic Studies from Maastricht Univerity. She works in the School of Governance since 2006, until 1 january 2015 mainly as director and vice director of the full time PhD programme. Before her employment at MGSOG, she was employed by the Boston Consulting Group, she was global senior analyst for the Corporate Finance and Strategy Department, focusing on strategy issues related to mergers, acquisitions and alliances, using various large global M&A and alliances databases. She also worked on several international projects in transition countries in the field of social protection, both as consultant and researcher.