Mark M.A.C. van Ostaijen is as Assistant Professor affiliated to the Department of Public Administration and Sociology (DPAS/ ESSB) at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He works as Managing Director of the LDE Centre Governance of Migration and Diversity.
In his previous research project, SmartUrbI, granted by NWO Urban Europe he studied how 'smart urban intermediaries' make a difference in neighborhoods of Amsterdam, Glasgow, Birmingham and Copenhagen. Before he started at Tilburg University, Mark worked as lecturer and PhD candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) and at the Netherlands School of Public Administration (NSOB).
In 2013, together with prof. dr. Godfried Engbersen and Peter Scholten, he received a NWO Urban Europe Research Grant on the research project ‘IMAGINATION’ which resulted in his PhD dissertation 'Worlds between words'Opent extern. This dissertation was awarded as ‘Best PhD thesis’ by the Erasmus Graduate School (2017).
During his PhD research he was one of the founders and chairman of the IMISCOE PhD network, an Organizing Committee Member of the Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA) conference in Leicester (UK) and a visiting doctoral research fellow at De Montfort University (UK).
Currently, he is an engaged public scholar, which resulted in his book ‘Wij zijn onsOpent extern. Een kleine sociologie van grote denkers’ (Vantilt, 2018, 3th edition), a Committee Member of the Colloquium Critical and Interpretive Public Administration at the Netherlands Institute of Government (NIG), Editorial Board Member of academic journal Beleid & Maatschappij and permanent author for the journal Sociologie Magazine