Dr. Rosamunde Van Brakel works as an Assistant Professor at the Fundamental Rights Centre (10%) and as postdoctoral researcher at the Crime and Society Research Group (CRiS)(90%) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Since 2021 she teaches and coordinates the Master course Legal, Ethical and Social Issues of Artificial Intelligence. She is co-PI of the FWO project: Smart Video Surveillance in Smart Cities: Deconstructing Security and Surveillance Discourses and IBOF Project Future-proofing Human Rights. Developing thicker forms of accountability at the VUB. She is also currently involved with CRiS as academic partner in the UK Keystone project on Responsible AI : Probable Futures: Probabilistic AI systems in Law Enforcement Futures. Previously, she coordinated the VUB Research Chair in Surveillance Studies (2019-2023), has taught courses at Tilburg university and Hasselt University and has been visiting professor at the Centre for Criminology at the University of Essex (UK) and Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa (Canada). She is currently (co-)supervising four PhD Students.  

She has been researching the social and ethical consequences of (algorithmic) surveillance technologies in the public sector since 2006. She defended her PhD Dissertation: Taming the future: A rhizomatic analysis of preemptive surveillance of children in 2018. Since finishing her PhD she has been conducting research on the democratic governance of surveillance, crime control, risk assessments and AI. Currently she is doing research on rhizomatic harms of algorithmic socio-technical systems used for crime control. She is member of the network and editorial board of the journal Surveillance & Society and the editorial board of the dutch-language criminological journal Panopticon.  She has co-edited six books and her work has appeared in journals such as Theoretical Criminology, Surveillance & Society, Computer, Law & Security, Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management,  Cahiers Politiestudies (Journal of Police Studies). 

Rosamunde has substantial experience in advisory roles, she was and is part of several advisory boards of EU-funded projects and has been invited as an academic expert at several occassions. For instance, she has been involved as an expert for the Belgian government in 2020 (Expert working group Coronalert app) and was an expert witness for the UK House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee inquiry on new technologies and law enforcement in 2021 and was invited to speak in 2022 at the hearing of the European Parliament PEGA inquiry 'Spyware used against citizens'.  Finally she also engages with civil society through her memebership of the boards of Privacy Salon, the not-for-profit organisation which organises the annual Computers, Privacy and Data Protection Conference, and the Ministry of Privacy.

Digital Criminology, Critical AI and Surveillance Studies,  Police and Security Studies,  Children and Youth studies, Youth Justice & Children's Rights, Critical Criminology, Feminist criminology and Intersectionality,  Zemiology, Green Criminology, Innovative qualitative methods