Vivian Thijssen is involved as a student assistant in the NWA-project Crafting Resilience and helps with administrative tasks and organizing events. She also assists in the Resilience & Security research line (part of the Crafting Resilience project) by analyzing government policies and arranging Community of Practice meetings, where the partners of the multidisciplinary consortium meet. This research line focuses on security issues with dilemmas and frictions of social resilience.

She also works as a student assistant for Prof. dr. Maartje van der Woude at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society (VVI). With her interest in law and society Vivian assists by helping with research related tasks such as summarizing case law and conducting systematic literature reviews. Furthermore, she is engaged as a research assistant in the Emotional Labour in the Borderlands project, a scientific and artistic research focusing on ethnic profiling at border controls. In this project border policing is approached as a form of emotional labour and deep stories from the border police officers are used to understand the underlying decision-making processes.