Past affiliations

Martin Hildebrand is a consultant forensic psychologist and researcher. He studied Mental Health Sciences and Law at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. During his studies, he worked as a research assistant at the Academic Behavior Therapy Unit of the Community Mental Health Center of Maastricht (1991-1993). In 1994 he began as a researcher at the Department of Law of Leiden University, in affiliation with the Netherlands Institute for the Studies of Crime and law Enforcement (NISCALE; in Dutch: NSCR), Leiden. In 1995 he resigned, took his bike and went to Australia and New Zealand to travel around.

From 1996 to 2004 he worked at the Dr. Henri van der Hoeven Kliniek, a forensic psychiatric hospital in Utrecht, first as an assistant researcher, later as a research psychologist, mainly working on research on psychopathy. In 2004 he obtained his PhD at the University of Amsterdam (Dissertation: ‘Psychopathy in the treatment of forensic psychiatric patients: Assessment, prevalence, predictive validity, and clinical implications’ ).

Between 2004 and 2005 he worked as a consultant forensic psychologist and researcher on several projects. For example, by order of the Expertise Centre for Forensic Psychiatry, he set up and conducted multicenter studies to answer the question which risk assessment instrument is best suited for (a) the prediction of violent behavior or (b) sexual violence and should therefore be used in forensic psychiatric hospitals as a general procedure.

From 2005 and 2007 he was the research director of the Expertise Centre for Forensic Psychiatry. In this period, as part of the official parliamentary inquiry into the system used to deal with criminals found to be mentally disturbed and treated in forensic psychiatric hospitals, Dr. Hildebrand was the principal investigator of the study that had to report on the extent, nature and prediction of absconding from leave, absconding without leave, and recidivism after absconding during forensic treatment in the period 2000-2005.