Van Engers studied Cognitive Artificial Intelligence at the Utrecht University 1990–1994 where he graduated in two specialisations; Cognition and Representation and Cognitive Ergonomics.

Van Engers received his PhD in 2001 for the thesis Knowledge Management; the Role of Mental Models in Business Systems Design at the faculty Mathematics and Information Sciences at the Free University in Amsterdam.

Van Engers works at the Ministry of Finance since 1983. From 1983 he worked at the Automation Directorate (Directie Automatisering der Rijksbelastingen (DAR)) at the Development Department (Bureau Ontwikkeling Automatiseringsprojecten). There Van Engers is involved in innovation and the development of design methods amongst others. He works as Manager Research at the Project Organisation Artificial Intelligence and Audit Automation from 1990 until 2000. In that function Van Engers is responsible for the research in new technologies. In that period he is the responsible project manager for many innovative projects (e,g, risk detection, natural language processing, data mining and digital intelligent agents on the Internet) and is he active as business consultant  especially within organisational change programmes (e.g. knowledge related organisational change at the Internal Audit Department IAB. Van Engers represents the Ministry of Financial in the interdepartmental working group Knowledge-based Systems from 1999 until 1996. From 1996 until 1999 Van Engers is co-chair of the Knowledge Management working group. From 2000 until 2007 he works for the Design department (Centre for Process and Product Design) as programme manager first managing the research programme POWER (Programme for and Ontology-based Working Environment for Rules and regulations). From 2003 Van Engers is general advisor to the government. Van Engers is involved as strategic advisor to many change programmes, including the INDiGO programme of the Dutch Immigration Service (IND) in the period 2007–2015.

He has coordinated several international research projects such as the EU sponsored research project E-POWER, Trias Telematica, Estrella and SEAL and participates in several NWO-sponsored projects.

Van Engers is professor in Legal Knowledge Management at the University of Amsterdam and managing director of the Leibniz Center for Law (www.LeibnizCenter.org). At the Faculty of Sciences he is Track Coordinator of the Business Information Systems Master Programme. Van Engers is teaching courses in Artificial Intelligence, Information Science, Rule Governance amongst others. Furthermore Van Engers is CEO of the Leibniz Foundation for Law.

Van Engers has been and is programme committee member of different international conferences such as the International Symposium on the Management of Industrial and Corporate Knowledge (ISMICK), ICAIL (International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law) and DEXA/E-Government. Van Engers is former chair of  the Vanwoodman International Society for Knowledge Productivity and former chair of the EU-Forum working group on Change Management and Cross-Institutional Issues. He is chairman of Jurix, the society for legal information sciences. Van Engers is member of the E-Government working group of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP).  Furthermore Van Engers is board member of Juriconnect and chair of the CEN/ISSS Metalex workshop on standards for legal sources.

Author
Jusletter IT

Publications

A complete list of Prof. van Engers' publications can be found here.