Dr. Natalie van der Wal is an Associate Professor at the Department of Multi-Actor Systems, section Systems Engineering and Simulation. She holds a PhD in both Psychology and Artificial Intelligence from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (2012). Before this position, dr. Van der Wal was a Senior Research Fellow at Leeds University Business School (2015 & 2018-2020) and Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (2012-2018).
Dr. van der Wal is an expert in agent-based modelling and simulation of group decision making and cognitive and social psychology of group dynamics. Dr. van der Wal received a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (2018-2020), was a Work Package Leader for EU H2020 project IMPACT (2015-2017), has won a best paper award (ICCCI conference 2017) and co-authored over 40 articles in the areas of agent-based modelling, evacuation research, positive psychology, behavioural informatics, socio-technical systems and group decision making.