Sidebar
About me
Brief biography
I grew up in Amsterdam (The Netherlands), on the Nieuwendammerdijk, a street that feels a bit like the countryside. In 1999 I started to cross the IJ every day, because I attended a secondary school in the city centre (Barlaeus). After finishing in 2005, there were three topics that I wanted to study:
- How a (human) brain works
- How a computer works
- How nature works
The last question seemed the most fundamental, so I did a bachelor in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Amsterdam. In 2008, I enrolled in a masters programme in theoretical physics, but after a few months I decided that this wasn’t what I was looking for. Later that year it became clear to me that I wanted to do a master in computational science, also at the University of Amsterdam. There were two reasons for this:
- Pen-and-paper calculations only get you so far in physics, and I wanted to be able to solve more problems.
- I enjoyed programming quite a bit.
Compared to theoretical physics, I felt solving problems on a computer allowed for much more creativity. Of course you can also be creative in theoretical physics, but most of the time you don’t come up with something that makes sense.
So the next year (2009), I started a master in Computational Science at the University of Amsterdam. After finishing in 2011, I did my PhD research at CWI in computational plasma physics, in the group of Ute Ebert. In 2015, I obtained my PhD.
In July 2016, I started working as a postdoc at the Centre for mathematical Plasma Astrophysics at the KU Leuven, in Belgium, with Rony Keppens. Since October 2018, I work as a researcher at CWI, in the Multiscale Dynamics group.
What I would eventually hope to contribute to: To allow current and future generations to freely marvel at the wonders of life and the universe.