Willem Vermeulen is a PhD candidate at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI-KNAW) and University Medical Centre Groningen (UMCG). In an affiliated project with POPNET he investigates whether the level of social cohesion around a couple can be linked to a couples’ risk of breaking up. This study is part of his PhD thesis, in which he investigates the importance of couple-level and contextual effects (as well as their interaction) in understanding differences in union dissolution risks in the Netherlands.
Willem has obtained a master’s degree in Computational Science at the University of Amsterdam and VU Amsterdam. During his studies, he examined historical internal migration patterns by building a historical population network of part of the Netherlands. Today, he still has a large interest in the possibilities of network analyses, particularly across multiple generations, to study human behavior.