Mariëtte Kaandorp

Mariëtte was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Organisation and Personnel Management. She passed away on 20 November 2020 at the much too young age of 35.

We will remember Mariëtte as a talented researcher, teacher, colleague and friend. Her loss will be felt not only by her family and friends but across the school, the scientific community and especially within her department, where she was a valued colleague.

Mariëtte had worked at RSM for more than 3 years. After finishing her PhD at the VU in Amsterdam in 2017, she started as a tenure track Assistant Professor at the Department of Organisation and Personnel Management. Her most recent research focused on cognition and the processes of social interaction in the workplace. More specifically, she studied giftedness, sensory processing sensitivity, intuition and social networking practices. In this work she collaborated with colleagues in and outside our school. Mariëtte was both an excellent researcher, with publications in the Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and a great teacher to students in our Part-time master programme and the MSc in Organisational Change and Consulting. She will be missed dearly by her students because she was able to make difficult concepts understandable and she had a special feel for people who were out of the ordinary like hypersensitive and highly gifted students.

Her warm personality also made her a great team member – someone who always had an opinion, a smile and let everybody feel at ease with her presence. She built bridges between colleagues and helped to make the department a strong and coherent research and teaching group.

Alongside her work, and having just settled in Rotterdam, Mariëtte was an excellent tennis player. She actively practiced yoga and even was a certified yoga teacher. She loved her family and became a proud aunt just a year ago. In her official CV, she described herself with the words “analytically and conceptually strong, empathetic, authentic and trustworthy”. This is exactly how we will remember her!

Our thoughts are with her family, of whom she always talked with the greatest warmth and affection.

With kind regards and fond memories of Mariëtte,