Hellen van der Kroef (H.M.A.)

Hellen van der Kroef is a PhD candidate at the Law & Tech Lab, conducting research at the intersection of law, linguistics and computer science. Her research aims to explore how automation and computational tools can assist in the detection of legal (non-)compliance in the transposition of EU directives, applying linguistic analysis of legislative texts through NLP and corpus-based approaches.

She completed a bachelor's in European Studies (with a political specialisation) at Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, during which she carried out an internship in collaboration with the Dutch Language Association and the Meuse-Rhine Euregion. Subsequently, she completed a double master's degree in European and International Law at respectively the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the University of Toulouse 1. Additionally, she ventured into the technological realm by following a well-credited, intensive course in web development at le Wagon, a private institution in Amsterdam. 

During her studies, she has consistently worked as a translator/proofreader and as a foreign language tutor on the side. She is a native speaker of Dutch and holds a Cambridge C2 diploma in English, a DALF C1 in French, a Goethe C1 in German, and a DELE C1 in Spanish. Besides, she is an enthusiastic user of Esperanto. 

Hellen initially pursued a career in IT. However, she was drawn to academia by the opportunity to combine her three areas of expertise through the undertaking of this highly interdisciplinary PhD research project.