I was born on May 12. 1965 in a town called Ridderkerk, a few kilometers south-east of Rotterdam. On the first picture you see the old part of the town center. By the way, I am still living there. It is a reasonably quiet town (about 46,000 people) where most of the inhabitants commute every day to Rotterdam or other nearby cities, because there is not much industry in Ridderkerk. Large shipyards have vanished and the new trend is now small companies involved with trading, transport, etcetera.

On the second picture you see a scenic part near to the place were I live. It is just a few hundred meters away from the residential area, but not many people know about this place.

At the age of 4 I went to kindergarten (I will try to dig up a nice picture) and two years later real life began at school. When I was 12 a new phase arrived and I went to junior high. If you want to see my former classmates then click on the next icon. It shows a picture taken in 1992 at a reunion.

In 1984 I graduated from high school and went to university in Leiden to study astronomy.After 3 years I got my propedeuse (Bachelors degree) - yes I know this is rather late - and in 1991 I got my Masters degree. The topic of my masters thesis was "High redshift radio galaxies with ultra steep spectra".

Immediately after that I started to work as a research assistant for two years (TWAIO) at the observatory in Leiden My main job there was setting up the production pipeline for the Westerbork Northern Sky Survey (WENSS), a survey of the sky at two wavelenghts with the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope. Please let me state here that I am NOT affiliated with the former camp Westerbork. This work involved seting up reduction facilities for the data, writing software, testing batch procedures, visualize data, archiving, you name it. One extra year was given to finish all software so the project go ahead smoothly.

During my study in Leiden I also gave tours together with other students at the old observatory. Every year during the national science week the observatory is open for visitors. You can see old instruments, telescopes that still work and people give interesting talks about old and modern astronomy. I still remember some cold nights in wintertime when I took pictures of the sky with the photographic refractor.

In march 1995 I started working at SRON in Utrecht as a scientific programmer . See the Work section for more information about what I am doing right now.

This document was last updated on 20/08/00