dr. V. (Vera) de Bel

Vera is an Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen (ICS/Department of Sociology), where she studies families as networks. During her BA in Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam (2010–2013), she became inspired to study kinship networks. Her interest in social network analysis led her to pursue a Research Master’s in Sociology at the University of Groningen (2013–2015).

Vera completed her PhD (2015–2019) at the same university, funded by a Talent Grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO), focusing on how parental divorce changes family networks and affects well-being. During her PhD, she collected the multi-actor dataset Lifelines Family Ties.

She subsequently held postdoctoral positions at the University of Geneva (2020–2022), where she studied young adults’ social networks; at the University of Turku (2022–2023), focusing on family ties and the transition to parenthood; and at the University of Cologne (2023–2025), supported by a Walter Benjamin Grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG), continuing her research on post-divorce family networks. During her time abroad, she also became a guest researcher at NIDI.

Recently, she was awarded an NWO VENI grant to study step-grandparenthood and the rise of “eight-grandparent families,” a project she will carry out at the University of Groningen (for more details, see projects).