A career combining fundamental research, applied modelling, education and scientific software development.
I obtained my MSc in Mechanical Engineering from Delft University of Technology, where I specialized in Computational Fluid Mechanics at the J.M. Burgerscentrum. I subsequently earned a PhD in the River Engineering Group at Delft University of Technology, focusing on sediment transport and morphodynamics.
Following my PhD, I joined Hokkaido University in Japan as a Guest Professor, where I was involved in both teaching and research in the fields of sediment transport and morphodynamics. During this period, I contributed to a national project commissioned by the Japanese government on the remediation of radioactive sediment and soil contamination resulting from the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
After returning to the Netherlands, I joined Deltares, initially within the Deltares Software Centre and subsequently within the Geo department. Throughout my career, I have combined fundamental and applied research with the development of advanced numerical methods and scientific software for environmental and engineering applications.
Alongside my position at Deltares, I am a Guest Researcher at the University of Twente, further developing my academic research and collaboration activities. My research interests include computational fluid dynamics, sediment transport, morphodynamics, turbulence, and particle-laden flows, with a particular focus on understanding how the motion and interaction of individual particles give rise to large-scale physical processes. In addition, I am engaged in research on non-Newtonian flows, rheology, thixotropy, granular segregation, geomechanics, and geothermal systems. A significant part of my work is devoted to the development of numerical methods, high-performance computing, and scalable computational frameworks for simulating complex physical processes on modern HPC platforms.