Welcome

ExPo

Previous Projects

EPICS-EPOL

Publications

Collaborators

Outreach

Miscellaneous

My research

I am an experimental astrophysicist and currently a research associate (postdoc) at the Leiden observatory. My work is focussed on astronomical polarimetry. Next to intensity and wavelength, polarisation is the third fundamental property of light. Compared to the other two, polarisation is under-used in astronomical observations. Together with my collaborators at the Leiden university and elsewhere, I’m trying to change this.

Polarisation can provide information on the origin of the light or on the medium it has traversed. Light reflected by circumstellar dust becomes polarised. This can help us distinguish it from the unpolarised light from the star itself and gain insight in the nature of the dust. This is exactly what we are doing with the Extreme Polarimeter, the instrument I developed during my PhD. Magnetism is an other physical effect that breaks the symmetry in the light propagation, thereby introducing polarisation. Polarimetry has been used for many years to study magnetic fields on stars, including our own sun. During my PhD I made a contribution to the polarimeter upgrade of the HARPS spectrograph, used for this kind of research. Much of my current work deals with technology development for the EPICS-EPOL instrument, a successor to ExPo that we have proposed for the future European Extremely Large Telescope. Polarimetry will enable this instrument to observe rocky planets around other stars.

Biography

My fascination with space and astronomy started at a young age, when I found some old magazines with pictures from the Apollo lunar landings. I was captivated by the prospect of complete new worlds waiting to be discovered and explored and the amazingly cool technology needed to do so. While I am to young to have watched any of the landings myself I vividly remember the thrill of the first space shuttle mission. My interest was nourished with the yearly ‘Ruimtevaart Jaarboek’ by Piet Smolders and any other book on astronomy or space research I could find at the local library.

I opted to study aerospace engineering at the TU Delft, specialising in spacecraft systems engineering. During this time I had the great fortune to participate in the YES-TEAMSAT project where a bunch of students and young engineers built a spacecraft from spare parts lying around at the European Space Technology Centre and launched it on board an Ariane 5 rocket. The initiator of this project was prof. Wubbo Ockels, the first Dutch astronaut. He was also my supervisor for my MSc thesis project, in which I developed a systems-level simulation of a proposed lunar mission, LunarSat.

After graduation I was a Young Graduate Trainee at the European Space Operations Centre, working on the operational simulators of the Rosetta and Mars Express missions. It was a wonderful experience being close to the day-to-day operations of Europe’s science missions. During this time I also got a scholarship to attend the International Space University’s summer school.

After my time at ESOC I spent some years working at TERMA in Leiden on simulators for SMART-1 and ATV amongst others. But I started to miss the scientific side which had been a part of some of my earlier projects. So when a chance presented itself to go back to university and do a PhD in astronomical instrumentation, I grabbed it. Supervised by prof. Christoph Keller, I developed the Extreme Polarimeter imaging polarimeter, and used it for novel observations of circumstellar disks and evolved stars. I obtained my my PhD in June 2011.

After my PhD I was able to continue the development of ExPo. After the demise of the Utrecht Astronomical Institute, our small band of polarimetrists have now moved to the Leiden Observatory.

Feel free to download my full CV.