Benjamin Ziepert, MSc
Behavioural Data Scientist at 2K Ireland 
In 2018, I graduated from the University of Twente with a Master’s degree in Psychology of Conflict, Risk and Safety (PCRS), earning Cum Laude (mark 10).
Why Psychology of Conflict, Risk and Safety?
I was drawn to PCRS because I wanted to understand topics like criminal behaviour, online misinformation, and evil leadership, and what can be done about them. For example, I was intrigued by courses like "Risk and Leadership" where we learned about the psychological, organizational, and political processes related to evil politicians, managers, and organizations [now integrated into: Psychology of Sustainability].
Next to the topics of PCRS, a good relationship with the staff was particularly important to me. I was able to have insightful scientific discussions with the lecturers, who encouraged me and other students to maximize our potential.
GPS Research
A great example of how the department staff supports students was my research into psychology and movement. This project began with a discussion I had with Dr. De Vries who suggested I could study the relationship between mental states and movement at PCRS. Therefore, as part of an internship, I started organizing experiments to study drug smuggling. We wanted to know if participants who supposedly smuggled drugs moved differently than people who did not. You can read more about the experiments on analyse-gps.com.
For the experiments, we recorded movement with GPS trackers, and to analyze the data, encouraged by Dr. Ufkes (a former employee of the PCRS department), I wrote my own analytics software (R package psyosphere). Soon, the experiments became too big for the internship, and the university hired me as a data scientist to finish my research. I used the experiments as the topic for my master thesis.
Our department head Prof. Dr. Ellen Giebels (former department head), also invited me to use psyosphere to study the behaviour of the participants for the Dutch TV show "Hunted". Therefore, I had the great pleasure of interviewing the TV show participants in the film studios in Amsterdam and analysing their behaviour. Read more about the research with "Hunted".
Lecturer
Because of my knowledge in R programming, statistics, and machine learning, professors like Dr. Zebel, Dr. De Vries and Dr. Ufkes asked me to give lectures to undergraduate and graduate students. For instance, Dr. Ufkes and I gave lectures on how Twitter tweets can be used to measure changing public sentiment after a public emergency.
Data Scientist
After finishing my master's, I first moved to work as a Team Lead Data Scientist for a startup in Amsterdam, and afterwards, I moved to Ireland to work as a data scientist for Vodafone Ireland. For my work at Vodafone Ireland, I studied customer behaviour with machine learning. For instance, during the pandemic, we developed a dashboard to inform the European Commission and Irish Government about how the pandemic restrictions influenced the movement of the public. After Vodafone, I started to work at the video game publisher 2K to make games more fun. For instance, we analyzed which parts of the games are too difficult or too easy by studying how players move through the game environment.
To my surprise, I found that my work as a data scientist is quite similar to what I learned and did at PCRS. In both cases, I use statistics and machine learning to analyze large datasets to understand why people make certain behavioural choices.
You can read more about my work on benjaminziepert.com.
Advise for (future) students
Although it may not always seem to be the case at a busy University, I found that the staff at PCRS always have a very large heart for the students and support them wherever they can. Therefore, if you have a great idea, go and talk to the professors, especially at the beginning of your master's to see what the possibilities are.