Dr. Caroline von der Heyden
Dr. Caroline von der Heyden is a criminologist with an economic background.
Between December 2014 and November 2021, she has been working as a Senior Research Fellow at BIGS on the development of collaborative research projects in the field of Capacity Building and Empowerment. Since 2016, she has been coordinating the workshop activities of the fit4sec-network to support the formation of European consortia for Security Research within Horizon 2020 “Secure Societies”. Until the end of 2019 she was responsible for the impact-oriented design, quality control and continuation strategy of the pilot project “Augenhöhe” (“Integration at eye level – Peer mediation of values for refugees”), funded by the Federal Programme “Live Democracy!” as an approach for democracy empowerment and the prevention of radicalization.
From June 2010 to June 2014, she was a Research Fellow at the Department of Criminology, Criminal Policy and Police Science of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Amongst others she contributed to the development and successful implementation of the extra-occupational Master’s program “Criminal Justice, Governance and Police Science”. The international successor of the German taught “blended-learning” program (“Criminology and Police Science”) targeted at special professional groups who are preparing for deployment in international missions or who are already active in transition or post-conflict societies. In this period, she began her doctoral studies –under the supervision of Professor Thomas Feltes – on the costs of crime and, how meaningful standards can be developed towards the application of assessment methods to facilitate the related discourse on evidence-based policy making in Germany (Dr. rer. soc.).
Next to her studies in economics in Maastricht and Sao Paulo (B.Sc. in Economics) and criminology in Edinburgh (M.Sc. in Criminology and Criminal Justice), she gained her first working experiences at international organizations and internationally engaged companies (German-American Chamber of Commerce, the OHRM-ETS at the United Nations in New York, Bertelsmann Shanghai), and was active as a Volunteer Mediator for alternative dispute resolutions in Edinburgh (SACRO).
