Dr. Rosamunde Van Brakel is an assistant professor at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Law and Crime & Society Research Group at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Since 2021 she teaches and coordinates the Master course Legal, Ethical and Social Issues of Artificial Intelligence and during the 2025-2026 academic year she has also taught the 1st year Bachelor course Sociology and Sociology of Law. She is currently co-PI of the FWO-SNSF project INFRASEC : Infrastructuring International Security: A comparative analysis of algorithmic passenger security and as academic partner in the EU Horizon Europe Salvus (Ensuring SAfer justice outcomes in onLine, including undercoVer, child sexUal abuse inveStigations) project. Previously, she was 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 and academic partner in the Horizon2020 project OPTED. Further, 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 in Criminology: 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 systems used for crime control and surveillance and more specifically in the context of policing environmental crimes. 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, co-authored one book 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 also has substantial experience in management roles: She was co-director of the Surveillance Studies Network (2019-2023) and executive director of the ngo Privacy Salon and event director of the annual Computers, Privacy and Data Protection conference (2014-2021). Further she is often asked to take up 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'.  

Digital Criminology, Critical AI and Surveillance Studies,  Police and Security Studies,  Critical Criminology, Green Criminology, Governance of crime control, Innovative qualitative methods, Human Rights, Youth Justice & Children's Rights,