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Johan Desseyn

Founder, tech-oriented social scientist and researcher

education, labour market, skills and social policy

johan.desseyn@mpiris.be

+32 485 92 85 41


Johan has a master’s degree in political sciences and founded Mpiris in June 2017. Before, he had already been doing applied social science research for more than ten years. Amongst his clients were the Flemish government, the cities of Ghent and Antwerp, the King Baudouin Foundation and many sectoral training organisations.



As a nine-year-old boy, I was already concerned about decisions affecting other people. Fantasizing about building a castle that provided the right living conditions and the protection people deserved, I could not guess this interest would become such a defining factor for my educational and professional career as it has been up to today.

 

After obtaining my master's degree in political sciences, I had the chance to get acquainted with political practice from the privileged position I held as staff member of a political youth organisation. I realized that my contribution to society would rather consist in providing the data to inform policy decisions than in the political decision-making itself.

 

During almost 12 years at a privately owned research agency, I was lucky to do exactly that.

I provided practical advice on specific policy questions, based on research.

In doing so, I studied issues in the fields of education, labour market and social policy and rendered services for a broad range of governmental authorities and non-profit organisations active in these domains.

 

The diverse nature of the research projects I was responsible for trained me in designing the right approach for each specific question and gave me the chance to develop advanced skills in quantitative as well as in qualitative research techniques.

In recent years, I particularly enjoyed the skills forecasts I conducted for various industries. Looking forward to the future, assessing the impact of new strategies and technologies on people, I was also urged to reflect on the future of social sciences.

At the same time, an old fascination of mine for Artificial Intelligence - once triggered by the reading of ‘Gödel, Esscher, Bach’ - was renewed by the growing datafication of our society. People and organisations, willingly and unwillingly, increasingly leave a digital trail telling us what they do and think.

 

As I had always been inclined to use technology in order to support my research activities, all these elements currently culminate into my current startup company.

 

My ambition is to keep answering the same type of societal relevant questions. But rather than relying only on the traditional methods that are used in social sciences to collect and analyse data, I want to use the opportunities that new technologies offer to a larger extent. In particular, I want to bridge the gap between data scientists coding the tools to collect and process data, and the societal stakeholders and decision-makers looking for insight. As such, I’m looking forward to help both technology providers and the authorities and organisations active in the fields of education, labour and social policy to have lager impact, by enabling them to make informed choices.

 

Geert Van den Bossche

Senior researcher

geert.vandenbossche@mpiris.be

+32 473 22 20 89

 

Geert obtained a Master in History at Ghent University and further tuned her research skills (including discourse analysis) with an MPhil (Social & Political Theory, 1990) and a PhD (in History, 1996) at Cambridge University (UK). On her return to Flanders she was the first postdoctoral researcher of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) at the Department of Political Sciences (UGent), where she did research on identity, citizenship and (political) community. Quality care, servicing and stakeholder management define her versatile career, among others in the book and youth sectors. Because of the importance of knowledge sharing and innovation stimulation, she returned to her first love: qualitative research.

Lennart Van Lancker

Junior researcher

lennart.vanlancker@mpiris.be

+32 470 82 17 88

 

Lennart obtained a master’s degree in sociology from Ghent University. He took a first taste of practice-oriented social research when he worked on a project in collaboration between Ghent University and the city council of Ghent. The aim of this project was to increase the accessibility of initiatives for healthy nutrition in elementary schools. From his childhood onwards, he had an interest in what drives people to live together, how societal structures are unconsciously formed and how they affect social life. As a Junior researcher at Mpiris, he wants to have an impact on social policy by delivering high-quality social research.

Vinnie De Craim

Junior researcher

vinnie.decraim@mpiris.be

+32 484 46 30 68


Vinnie achieved a bachelor of audiovisual arts at RITCS and a master of science in sociology at the university of Ghent. His first taste of social science research was his master’s thesis. This research used a longitudinal and mixed methods design to study changes in Flemish literary education between 1973 en 2013. Because of his passion for innovative quantitative techniques and his belief in the power of storytelling, his ambition is to communicate insights from the chaotic world of data to stakeholders in an accessible and recognisable way.

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