Dr. Ir. Kathalijne Visser

Position: Professor
Professorship: Human-Animal Interactions
Email: k.visser@aeres.nl
Telephone number: +31 68 22 17 748
Social media: LinkedIn

Kathalijne Visser graduated at Wageningen UR as an animal scientist and obtained her doctorate at Utrecht University/ID Lelystad in 2002 on the subject of the personality of horses. Subsequently, she stayed on at Wageningen Livestock Research as a senior researcher of animal welfare. She led national and international projects for local government and businesses. Some examples of these projects are: the development of the welfare monitor in horse breeding; risk analyses of animal welfare for various farm animal chains. From 2007 to 2015, she was a co-founder and board member of the International Society for Equitation Science (ISES). In 2011, she organised the annual ISES conference in the Netherlands, and in 2023, she was appointed honorary fellow of ISES. In 2015, she began working as a teacher researcher at Aeres University of Applied Sciences Dronten in the Practice-based Research Team.

In 2020, she became the professor of Human-Animal Interactions, which centres around embedding animal welfare in human-animal interaction. Her research fields of interest are: animals in healthcare and security; animals in sport and leisure, and animal management. Here horses and dogs play the leading roles. She has also been the secretary of the Institute for Animal Welfare (IVD) at Aeres. This organisation ensures that great care is taken in the use of animals in research and education. Besides her work at Aeres University of Applied Sciences, Kathalijne is also a member of the Council for Animal Matters (RDA).