Berthe Jansen is Assistant Professor of Tibetan Studies at Leiden University. She is a scholar of Buddhist Studies, specializing in Tibetan social and religious history. She lived in India for five years and graduated from the Lotsawa Rinchen Zangpo Translator Programme in Dharmashala in 2005. Thereafter she obtained a BA in Indology at Leiden, an MPhil in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies at Oxford, and a PhD degree in Buddhist Studies back in Leiden. Jansen had a Dutch government grant (NWO) to research the relationship between Buddhism and law in pre-modern Tibet (2016-2022), prior to her appointment as tenured staff at Leiden University.

She is currently the PI of the ERC-funded project: Locating Literature, Lived Religion, and Lives in the Himalayas: The Van Manen Collection (2023-2028). Her monograph The Monastery Rules: Tibetan Monastic Organization in Pre-modern Tibet came out in 2018 with University of California Press. In 2023, her first Buddhism-inspired children's book Don't Kill the Bugs came out with Bala Publications. She has worked as an interpreter and translator of Buddhist Tibetan since 2004.