EELKE HEEMSKERK
Eelke Heemskerk is Professor of Political Networks and director of the Computational Social Science programme, University of Amsterdam. His research lies at the intersection of political economy, socio-economics and (corporate) governance.
RESEARCH
His research revolves around three themes: Population Scale Network Analysis, the political economy of sustainable finance in the age of passive investing, and networked elements of global corporate governance.
TEACHING
At the University of Amsterdam he teaches political science. In addition Eelke is the director of the first Computational Social Science bachelors programme in the Netherlands, a new program started in September 2021.
CURRENT PROJECTS
PLANET-NL is an academic research platform centered around infrastructure for the analysis of large-scale (social) networks. It brings together researchers, engineers and practitioners by providing software, expertise, tools, and opportunities for research and collaboration.
Eelke is the director of Computational Social Science at the University of Amsterdam. This is a bachelor programme that combines data science with social and behavioural science making students collaborate in groups and with external partners to solve real world problems.
PAST PROJECTS
The POPNET project ran from 2020 to 2024 and was a novel digital infrastructure and research community with the aim of unlocking longitudinal social network data on the entire population of the Netherlands for academic research purposes. Since 2025, the developed digital infrastructure and research community are now under the umbrella of the Netherlands Platform for Large-scale Analysis of NETworks (PLANET-NL).
Corporate Network Governance: Power, Ownership and Control in Contemporary Global Capitalism explores the global network of corporate ownership and control as a complex system.