Jan Van den Bulck

Jan Van den Bulck was born and raised in the sixties, in Flanders, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium. As an undergraduate he wrote radio-plays for Flemish and Dutch radio stations, and as a graduate student he was a TV critic for Studio Brussel, a Belgian NPR station, before becoming a faculty member at the University of Leuven, where he was Department Chair and Associate Dean of Research in the Faculty of Social Sciences.

In 2016 he became Professor of Media Psychology at the University of Michigan, where he is currently Director of the Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences program.

Professor Van den Bulck is a pioneer in researching media and sleep; his research interests also include the unintended effects of media use on perceptions, attitudes, and behavior, particularly how and what people learn about the real world from their exposure to fiction.

In his spare time Jan Van den Bulck is fascinated by exploring the differences between the real world and how the media portray it. He has been a soldier (briefly) a certified EMT (even more briefly), a doorman/bouncer, a kungfu instructor, and he once did the choreography of a fashion shoot. Most of all, however, he enjoys being at home in Ann Arbor, with his wife, teenage kids, and cats. When he isn't reading history books he enjoys Robert Crais, John Sandford, Elmore Leonard, and other crime writers.