Sandra van Thiel is Professor of Public Administration and Vice Dean of research at the Nijmegen School of Management. She is currently also a member of the committee to evaluate national police law, a member of the committee to evaluate the quality care process for research at HBO schools, and a member of the Think Tank on Regional Government, set up by the Province of Gelderland. She has studied psychology and educational sciences in Nijmegen and obtained her doctorate with the sociological research school ICS in Utrecht in 2000.

Her research focuses on quasi-autonomous agencies, at national and local level, in the Netherlands and abroad. The relationship between such agencies and their parent government is one of the core issues in her research. In 2016, she and her colleagues won the IRSPM Best Paper Award for their article Public Accountability in coalition negotiations, evidence from a face-to-face negotiating experiment