Niels van Dijk

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. In addition he contributes to standards development within REEFDs, the OpenID Foundation and DIIP.

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 services, which currently provide national level federated identity services for cloud and research access for over one million users. As part of the pan-European GÉANT project, Niels initiated eduTEAMs in support of pan-European research and EOSC, InAcademia to facilitate privacy preserving validation of student affiliation and 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 participated in EU Large Scale pilots DC4EU and EBSI-Vector. Currently Niels is the tech lead for the eduWallet project (https://eduallet.nl) which explores the opportunities of using wallet technology in educational context through a series of PoC and pilot projects, including integrations with the Dutch EUDI wallet.