Niels van Dijk is a Technical Product Manager working in Trust & Identity at SURF, the Dutch National Research and Educational Network. In this role he is responsible for development and innovation of SURF’s authentication and authorization services. Combining more then 15 years of expertise in AAI with business development and privacy & data protection skills, he is able to deliver a holistic approach to the development of innovative services.
Niels likes to be in the forefront of things and as such has been involved in many national and international projects. Within SURF, he initiated the SURFconext and SURF Research Access Management service, which currently provide national level federated identity services for cloud and research access. As part of the pan-European GÉANT project, Niels initiated eduTEAMs, in support of pan-European research collaborations, and InAcademia, to facilitate privacy preserving validation of student affiliation. Currently, he is the lead of the GÉANT Trust and Identity Incubator.
In recent years Niels has engaged increasingly with Self Sovereign Identity and wallets. Next to activities within SURF and his role as co-chair for the GÉANT Task Force on Distributed Ledger Technologies, he also participates in EU Large Scale pilots DC4EU and EBSI-Vector.
