Lieutenant Colonel (Gwendolyn) Kamp-Bakx joined the Royal Netherlands Air Force in August 1990. She studied Organizational Management & Weapon Systems at the Royal Military Academy from 1990 to 1994, Flight School (helicopters) at the Royal Netherlands Air Force from 1993 to 1996, Labour Psychology at the Open University in the Netherlands from 1997 to 2006, and Human Factors and System Safety at the Lund University in Sweden from 2008 to 2010. Gwendolyn successfully defended her PhD dissertation on Safety in Large-Scale Socio-technological Military Systems at Delft University in June 2016.

Gwendolyn has a background in transport helicopters and academics. She has no specific area of expertise but generally looks at worldly issues from a social science perspective that has over time been moulded towards a critical academic but pragmatic (socio-technical) complex systems view.

Gwendolyn has flown the Alouette III (1996-1997), BO-105 (1997-2001), and the CH-47 (2001-2010). She has been on missions to Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq (three times) and Afghanistan (twice). She worked as a squadron pilot, deputy flight commander and flight commander. In Iraq, she served two tours as deputy S3 Air, in Afghanistan one tour as S3 Air.

During the timeframe 1998 to 2001 Gwendolyn served as deputy commander of the Aircrew Survival School. From 2006 to 2010 she served as helicopter flight safety officer at the Air Force HQ. In 2010, she started at the Faculty of Military Sciences (FMS) at the Netherlands Defence Academy (NLDA) where she worked in several positions: Assistant Professor in Human Factors & System Safety (2010-2014), Lecturer-researcher in leadership, ethics and behaviour (2014-2016), Assistant Professor in Civil-Military Cooperation (2016-2019, civilian position), and Associate Professor in Human Factors and System Safety (2019-2023, civilian position). During her work at the FMS she published a number of academic articles.

In 2016, Gwendolyn retired from the Air Force, to return in 2023. As of Sep 2023, Gwendolyn took a position at the Air and Space Warfare Center (ASWC) at the Air Force HQ, to move from there to the JAPCC. At the ASWC she wrote the Future Operating Concepts for both the Air and the Space domain.