Jean-Louis van Gelder studied both law and psychology at the University of Amsterdam. After finishing his doctorate on the development of informal settlements in the city of Buenos Aires (Ph.D 2009, University of Amsterdam) he shifted his research focus to crime research and worked at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR), first as a postdoc and later as a senior researcher. In 2012 he obtained a second Ph.D (psychology) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In 2018, he was appointed as Full Professor at the University of Twente (NL). Since January 2020 van Gelder heads the Department of Criminology at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law (formerly Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law).