Welcome. I am an astrophysicist working at the NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Baltimore, funded through a Hubble Fellowship. You are currently visiting my academic website where I intend to report about recent papers and results.
My research interests are wide, but my main expertise is computation modeling of the evolution and final fate of (populations of) stars. In particular, I am interested in the impact of rotation and the presence of a nearby binary companion. Although my main work is theoretical and computational, I am closely involved in observing programs with the Hubble Space Telescope, the European Very Large Telescope and the Canadian-Hawaiian-French Telescope.
I was born and raised in the Netherlands and obtained my doctorate degree at the former Astronomical Institute of the University at Utrecht. I held short term positions at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in Spain as summer trainee and at the Argelander-Institut für Astronomie (AIfA) at the University of Bonn in Germany as a postdoctoral fellow. I moved to the United States in 2010.
The background image in the banner shows some of the brightest and most massive stars that can be directly imaged with the Hubble Space Telescope. Many of them are born in close pairs and rotate rapidly. Credit background banner: NASA, ESA, F. Paresce, R. O’Connell, and the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee
