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I have developed both particle-in-cell and plasma fluid codes for the simulation of electric discharges (non-thermal plasmas), see projects. I'm also active in the development of MPI-AMRVAC, a framework for (magneto)hydrodynamics simulations. From a computational point of view, my work has focused on topics such as:

• Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR)
• Parallelization (using MPI and/or OpenMP)
• Fast elliptic solvers (multigrid)
• Adaptive control of particle weights

Since the end of 2018 I'm involved in two projects on machine learning for space physics applications, namely AIDA and ESCAPE, together with Enrico Camporeale.

This is an incomplete list of topics that I'd like to investigate. If you are interested in collaborating or doing a student project, feel free to get in touch (see contact).

• Adding support for internal boundary conditions in a geometric multigrid solver.
• Finding the fastest possible direct sparse method for solving the coarse grid equations in a geometric multigrid method.
• Enabling efficient visualization of octree AMR data in Visit or Paraview.
• Coupling stiff chemistry to simulations with AMR (adaptive mesh refinement), where the chemistry can be evaluated at coarser resolution and perhaps partially implicitly.
• Performing large scale 3D simulations of sprite formation
• Coupling particle and fluid models in energy space, for the study of runaway electron production in electric discharges.
• More robustly solving plasma fluid equations in discharge models using explicit time integration.
• Investigating the so-called “stability field” of streamer discharges through computations, with the goal of predicting how this field depends on the gas.
• Investigating what happens when discharges are 'long' compared to the time scale for electron attachment.
• Making a tool to estimate discharge inception probability and jitter from an electrostatic potential (*currently in progress with Shahriar Mirpour and Andy Martinez*).
• Compare particle-in-cell and plasma fluid models for 2D and 3D simulations of streamer discharges.

List of publications.

I finished my PhD thesis in November 2015. The work was done in the Multiscale Dynamics¹⁾ group at CWI, under the supervision of Ute Ebert.

After finishing secondary school in 2005, there were three topics that I wanted to study:

• How a (human) brain works
• How a computer works
• How nature works

Thus far, I have mostly been busy with the latter two questions, with my primary research interests being computational science and computational physics. I like to study systems that have some intrinsic complexity, not coming from boundary conditions or input data.