Shenja van der Graaf is a senior researcher and project leader at iMinds-SMIT. She is a visiting senior fellow at LSE, honorary fellow at MIT Media Lab ID³ Hub, and a Futures of Entertainment fellow.

If there is one common thread joining her various research activities together, it is an interest in moments of transition and the dynamics that accompany them. Her current research is concerned with issues arising from innovations associated with the Future Internet. She is particularly intrigued by social, urban and organisational transformation and new technologies, and has tended to approach this nexus of issues through several specific lines of inquiry of (distributed) information and innovation; software/code markets; smart cities (esp. cloud computing, professional mobility, open data); (new/social) media users, communities & cultures; trust and crime in cyberspace; and research methods.

Van der Graaf is a graduate of Utrecht University (MA, 1999) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (PhD, 2009). She was a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society (Harvard) and the Research Center for Information Law (University of St. Gallen), a consulting researcher at Convergence Culture Consortium (MIT), an alumna of the Oxford Internet Institute, and worked as consultant for Hakuhodo in Tokyo.