ESCIENCE CENTER - Key Persons

Carsten Schnober

Job Titles:

Research Software Engineer

Carsten studied Computational Linguistics and Applied Computer Science at the University of Heidelberg and Speech & Language Processing at the University of Edinburgh. He subsequently worked as a research engineer for the "Institute for the German Language" (IDS Mannheim) and for the UKP Lab at the TU Darmstadt. His academic focus lies on Natural Language Processing and its applications in Digital Humanities and other inter-disciplinary projects. After moving to Amsterdam in 2017, Carsten worked in R&D labs of different companies with a focus on making NLP, Information Retrieval, and recommender systems applicable for companies in domains including HR, scientific knowledge management, and education technology. Carsten's development work has focused on NLP techniques like Transformer-based language models (BERT), Neural Information Retrieval, multi-lingual text classifications and domain-specific Named Entity Recognition (NER), while the underlying research oftentimes intersects with fields like linguistics and cognitive science. Carsten has been an author and editor for different Linux and Open-Source publications for many years. In his free time, he engages in the foundation of an NGO which aims to foster dialogue between philosophers, journalists and technologists about technological infrastructures, with a practical approach. Carsten has joined the eScience Center in 2022 with the ambition to develop research software with industry standards for inter-disciplinary academic research projects as well as for the rest of the open-source world.

Christiaan Meijer

Job Titles:

Netherlands EScience Center As a Research Software Engineer
Research Software Engineer

Christiaan has studied Psychology, Physics and Artificial Intelligence, all at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Christiaan received his master's in both Psychology and Artificial Intelligence, track Intelligent Systems. In his thesis, he applied reinforcement learning to the problem of learning new behaviour in the field of robotics. His specialties include machine learning, pattern recognition, computer vision and reinforcement learning. During and after his study, he worked at Conclusion Learning Centers developing a Learning Management System (LMS). For this system, he developed various new functionalities which include a recommender system that recommends users products based on their previous behaviour and setting up new catalog search functionality using Elastic Search. In 2013, Christiaan joined the Netherlands eScience Center as a Research Software Engineer to work on the eEcology project.

Dr. Abel Soares Siqueira

Job Titles:

Netherlands EScience Center As Research Software Engineer
Senior Research Software Engineer

Abel Soares Siqueira has a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the State University of Campinas, Brazil, during which he worked on the extension of an optimization method for inequality constraints. In late 2014, he became an assistant professor in the Mathematics Department at the Federal University of Paraná, Brazil. In that position, he became interested in reproducible research inside the nonlinear optimization field, which led to the creation of the JuliaSmoothOptimizers (JSO) GitHub organization. JSO consists of packages to support the development of optimization methods in the Julia language. It helps the researcher to prototype, test, benchmark, and publish the results with ease. He's also been interested in data science and machine learning since 2018. He helped create and manage an activity group in Brazil for students and practitioners called CiDAMO, which promotes monthly online meet-ups and has a yearly week-long event. Since 2010, he has been involved in workshops and training camps like those of Software Carpentry, teaching mainly Git or Bash. Since 2020, he has focused that creative energy on producing YouTube videos (https://www.youtube.com/AbelSiqueira) primarily about the Julia language. Abel joined the Netherlands eScience Center as Research Software Engineer in the summer of 2021.

Dr. Adam S.Z. Belloum

Job Titles:

Assistant Professor

Dr. Adam S.Z. Belloum is an Assistant Professor in the System and Network Engineering (SNE) research group at the Institute of Informatics of the University of Amsterdam. He is also a member of the MultiScale Networked Systems (MNS) part of Systems and Networking Lab (SNE) of the informatics institute of the University of Amsterdam. He received his MSc and PhD degrees from the Université de Technologie de Compiègne, France. He is leading the research on optimal scheduling of complex distributed data intensive scientific application on e-Infrastructure, and developing methods and techniques for managing data across federated storage. He has participated in a several research projects and a number of Dutch funded projects (VLAMG, VL-e, COMMIT, gSLM, VPH-share and EDISON). Currently leading research activities in two research projects logistics on Data logistics for (DL4LD), and health Enabling Personal Interventions(EPI ).

Dr. Alessio Sclocco

Job Titles:

Research Software Engineer

Alessio studied Computer Science at the University of L'Aquila (Italy), where he obtained a bachelor's and master's (cum laude) degrees. He also obtained a master's in Computer Science from Vrije Universiteit (VU) in Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, he developed an interest in high-performance and parallel computing and began working with Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) during his master's project. After graduation, he worked for over a year as a researcher at the VU exploring the acceleration of radio astronomy algorithms. He later started a PhD at the VU on the topic of accelerating radio astronomy algorithms using many-core accelerators and auto-tuning. During his PhD, he also spent a year working as a Scientific Programmer at ASTRON, the Netherlands institute for Radio Astronomy, contributing to the real-time pipeline for ARTS, the Apertif Radio Transients System. He defended his PhD at the VU in 2017. Alessio joined the Netherlands eScience Center in February 2017. In 2019, he spent three months as a visiting scholar at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Dr. Aron Jansen

Job Titles:

Research Software Engineer

Aron obtained a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Utrecht University in 2018, and went on to do a postdoc at the University of Barcelona. His research was on black holes, partially in five dimensions, where they can be related to fluids through holography, and partially in our familiar four dimensions. This involved a lot of numerics: from linear perturbations of black holes for which he wrote a package to compute them, to nonlinear time evolutions out of equilibrium black holes. Some projects also had an analytical component, with heavy use of Mathematica to transform various forms of the Einstein equations into a more manageable form. Along the way he developed a fascination for machine learning and looked for ways to apply it to scientific research, which he found by joining the Netherlands eScience Center as a Research Software Engineer in January 2021.

Dr. Artur Palha

Job Titles:

Senior Research Software Engineer

Artur Palha has a M.Sc. in Applied Physics from the University of Lisbon in Portugal, and a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. His expertise is on the development of (structure preserving) high order numerical discretisations for the fast and efficient solution of PDEs. He is interested in the development and implementation of these ideas into general frameworks for the discretisation of physical field laws. He has worked with these techniques on the solution of diverse (multi)-physics problems. At the National Laboratory of Civil Engineering in Portugal, he worked on the simulation of ocean waves nearshore, and wave energy devices. At TU Delft, as co-PI of a CSER project, he worked on reservoir modelling; together with Sandia National Labs in the USA, he worked on pHyFlow, an Eulerian-Lagrangian flow solver for modelling vertical axis wind turbines; and with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and Monash University he worked on atmospheric flows. At TU Eindhoven, together with École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), he worked on a fusion reactor numerical simulator for control purposes. At ASML, he worked on the development of electromagnetic. solvers. A detailed overview of Artur's research work can be found on his website: http://www.palha.org . Artur joined the Netherlands eScience Center as a Senior Research Software Engineer in the Natural Sciences & Engineering Section in April 2022.

Dr. Barbara Vreede

Job Titles:

Senior Research Software Engineer

Dr. Ben van Werkhoven

Job Titles:

Senior Research Software Engineer

Ben holds a PhD in High-Performance Distributed Computing, specifically GPU Computing. He works as a Senior Research Software Engineer at the Netherlands eScience Center, where he is the leading GPU Computing expert. His responsibilities include leading several projects, co-supervising PhD students and conducting research. As a senior researcher, Ben is involved in accelerating scientific research using GPUs in many collaborations with national and international partners, across many disciplines, including microscopy, climate modelling and radio astronomy. Ben has published on methods for porting applications to GPUs, performance models, and tools for testing and auto-tuning GPU applications. Ben is leading several work packages in large projects, including the NWO (NWA-ORC) CORTEX Project - the Center for Optimal, Real-Time Machine Studies of the Explosive Universe, and in the EU H2020 ESiWACE2 project - Centre of Excellence in Simulation of Weather and Climate in Europe. In addition, he is co-PI of the eWaterCycle II project on the structural evaluation of Hydrological models. Ben is also a co-founder of the Netherlands Research Software Engineers community (NL-RSE).

Dr. Candace Makeda Moore

Job Titles:

Research Software Engineer

Dr. Candace Makeda H. Moore, MD, earned her B.A, from Columbia University in the USA and her medical degree from Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Israel. She has worked as a physician and also worked in computation for medical research. She has developed scientific software programs for various applications, including programs related to diverse aspects of radiology data, and programs for infectious disease modeling and prediction. She has a deep interest in the application of various computational techniques to medical image data. Candace Makeda joined the Netherlands eScience Center as a Research Software Engineer in January 2022.

Dr. Carlos Martinez-Ortiz

Job Titles:

Community Manager

Dr. Carlos Rocha

Job Titles:

Research Software Engineer

Dr. Colette Bos

Job Titles:

Programme Director
Programme Director of the Netherlands

Since March 2023, Colette is the programme director of the Netherlands eScience Center. As programme director, her main responsibility is the call strategy and the supervision of its implementation. For this, she works closely with the Programme Managers. She also contributes to the general management of the eScience Center in the directors team and to external relations of the Netherlands eScience Center. Colette obtained her PhD at Utrecht University, with research on how scientists connect their work to large societal goals in science policy. After that, she moved to NWO, where she worked as a coordinator on the development of the Dutch National Research Agenda (Nationale Wetenschapsagenda, NWA) and as management board member in the European Joint Programming Initiative Urban Europe. This was followed by two years as board secretary at the Mathematics department of Utrecht University, where she contributed to strategy and policy development and implementation of the department and where she managed operational matters.

Dr. Cunliang Geng

Job Titles:

Research Software Engineer

As a research software engineer, Cunliang follows this motto: Encapsulate complexity, Deliver simplicity; For science, For you! Cunliang has a bachelor's and master's degree in Life Science from Shandong University, and a PhD degree in Computational Structural Biology from Utrecht University. During his master's, he mainly studied molecular modelling and simulations and conducted a project to study the processivity of cellobiohydrolase using molecular dynamic simulations. Cunliang started his PhD in 2014 and became interested in machine learning and data analysis. His research generated two peer-reviewed machine learning-based methods (iScore and iSEE), which facilitate fast and reliable scoring and binding affinity prediction of protein-protein interactions. He has also been active in the grand challenges of CAPRI and D3R that aim to test computational algorithms in blind predictions of protein-protein and protein-ligand poses and affinity rankings.

Dr. Dani Bodor

Job Titles:

a Research Software Engineer
Research Software Engineer

Dani is a cell biologist by training and spent about 15 years as an academic on quantitative cell biology and biophysics. He did his PhD work at the Gulbenkian Science Center outside Lisbon, studying cell division and epigenetics. One key discovery he made was to determine the molecular copy number of a key protein at the centromere, responsible for accurate cell division. For this, he developed algorithms to automatically detect, and measure diffraction limited fluorescent signals from microscopy images. In 2015, Dani started a postdoc at University College London on the biomechanics of confined cell migration. Here he developed microfabricated environments, microscopy protocols, and data analysis workflows, allowing him to quantify cell behavior in confinement. In 2019, he started a second postdoc and at the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht, working once again on cell division, this time on chromosome segregation. he was heavily involved in microscopy data analysis for various ongoing projects and developed, among other things, pipelines for visualizing 4-dimensional (3D+time) microscopy data and for scoring phenotypes from microscopy images. Dani joined the eScience Center as a Research Software Engineer in September 2022, working in the Life Sciences section.

Dr. Elena Ranguelova

Job Titles:

Netherlands EScience Center As an Research Software Engineer

Elena received a PhD degree in Computer Science from Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland in 2003 on the topic of 3D texture analysis and modelling with application to MRI brain images. Since then, she worked on variety of interdisciplinary projects and application areas. At the Centrum Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam, Elena worked on European and NWO projects for photo-identification of cetaceans. Her paper on saliency detection for photo-identification was awarded best paper at GVIP in 2005. In 2007, Elena worked at the Dutch Center for Applied Research, TNO, on object recognition tools for assisting the police investigators in their work. Between 2008 and 2012, she was part of the R&D team of Prime Vision, B.V., Delft, developing OCR and indicia recognition software for the postal industry. Elena joined the Netherlands eScience Center as an Research Software Engineer in 2013 to work on multidisciplinary projects involving imaging. Between 2014 and 2019, she was an eScience Coordinator and line-manager of several engineers, coordinating many eScience collaborative projects primarily in the climate, biomedical imaging and ecological domains. Since the spring of 2019 she's held the role of Technology Lead AI. Elena is currently leading an eScience Center technological project on eXplainable AI; DIANNA: Deep Insight and Neural Network Analysis.

Dr. Ellen van Schoten - Chairman

Job Titles:

Chairman of the Board

Dr. Eva Viviani

Job Titles:

Research Software Engineer

Dr. Ewan Cahen

Job Titles:

Back - End Developer

Ewan studied Mathematics at the VU Amsterdam and consequently did a PhD at the CWI. His research focused on efficiently estimating extremely small probabilities. He obtained his PhD degree at the TU/e in January 2019 for his thesis "Rare-event simulation for multidimensional stochastic models". Following his thesis, he joined a software company where he worked as a full-stack developer on various projects for two and a half years. In his free time, Ewan enjoys bouldering and playing board games. He also plays in a wind orchestra. Ewan joined the eScience Center in October 2021 where he will be working as a back-end developer on the Research Software Directory.

Dr. Fakhereh (Sarah) Alidoost

Job Titles:

Research Software Engineer

Dr. Fenne Riemslagh

Job Titles:

Coordinator Training Program

Dr. Flavio Hafner

Job Titles:

Research Software Engineer

During his PhD-at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and at University College London-Flavio investigated how wages and employment are determined when labor markets are not perfectly competitive. To answer these questions, Flavio integrated data from administrative registries, combined them with geospatial data and applied statistical methods. To separate cause from effect, Flavio combined regression analysis with quasi-experimental research designs. To estimate elasticities in economic models of production and labor supply, Flavio wrote R and python programs that apply versions of the Generalized Method of Moments. Flavio then moved to Aalto University for a post-doc. In a project on e-commerce, he improved and extended the data architecture that he built during his PhD. In another project-funded by Jan Wallanders and Tom Hedelius foundation-, Flavio and his co-author studied how professional networks shape employment decisions and research productivity of researchers in U.S. academia. Here, Flavio designed and managed a large relational database of bibliometric data, used machine learning and natural language processing to link records between two data sources, and contributed to the statistical analysis of the linked data. Besides research, Flavio also designed and taught a new graduate-level course in labor economics, ran a reading group and organized research workshops for PhD students. Flavio joined the eScience Center in November 2022 as a Research Software Engineer where he wants to apply methods from statistics and computer science to answer research questions. He also wants to make research software more efficient, open source and reusable-for applications within and outside of academia.

Dr. Francesco Nattino

Job Titles:

Research Software Engineer

Francesco studied Chemistry, obtaining both a bachelor's and a master's from the University of Milan. During his studies, he became interested in the use of computer simulations to model chemical processes. He carried out part of his master's project in the Theoretical Chemistry group at Leiden University, where he then stayed for his PhD and Postdoc. He then moved to EPFL in Switzerland, where he has worked as a Postdoc in the Materials Science department. During his career, he developed and applied computational methods to perform quantum-mechanical simulations of reactions at surfaces, mostly exploiting high-performance computing. More recently, he has worked on the development of algorithms to model electrochemical interfaces using continuum solvation approaches.

Dr. Frank Seinstra

Job Titles:

Policy Advisor

Frank worked as a scientific researcher in the fields of High-Performance and Distributed Computing, and eScience for nearly 20 years. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Amsterdam in 2003, based on his thesis on user transparent parallel multimedia computing. From 2003 to 2009, as Postdoc at the University of Amsterdam and VU University Amsterdam, he generalized and expanded his PhD-work to ‘wall-socket' multi-cluster distributed computing. In 2009, he became Assistant Professor at VU University and leader of the Jungle Computing Research & Applications (JCRA) group, focusing on the concurrent use of ‘any type' of compute hardware in solving large-scale scientific problems. From 2009 to 2012, using the Jungle Computing paradigm, he led successful collaborations with many scientific domains, including computational astrophysics (Leiden University), climate modeling (Utrecht University), and remote sensing (University of Extremadura, Spain). In May 2012, Frank joined the Netherlands eScience Center, initially as a senior eScience Engineer and Project Coordinator. In this role he defined and established eSTeP, the eScience Technology Platform. In recent years the eSTeP initiative has been transformed into the eScience Center's "Research Software Directory". In October 2012, Frank joined the Director's Team of the eScience Center, from fall 2013 as Program Director. In this role, he is primarily responsible for the eScience Center's Call Strategy, and its open calls for proposals. Frank has received several international awards (including a Most Visionary Research Award at AAAI 2007), and has won first prizes in several international computing challenges (including IEEE SCALE 2008, IEEE DACH 2008, IEEE SCALE 2010). Frank has been a Steering Group Member of generations 3 to 6 of the Dutch national Distributed ASCI Supercomputer (DAS). He has also been an initiator and Editor-in-Chief of SoftwareX, a scientific journal focusing on the open access publishing of peer reviewed and impactful research software. In 2016, he and his SoftwareX co-editors received the prestigious Association of American Publishers' PROSE award for Innovation in Journal Publishing.

Dr. Gijs van den Oord

Job Titles:

Research Software Engineer

Gijs studied Theoretical Physics and Mathematics at Utrecht University. For his master's thesis, he investigated the relationship between super-membranes and matrix models in string theory. Thereafter, he did a PhD in Particle Physics at the Radboud University Nijmegen and Nikhef, during which he developed Monte Carlo simulations for weak boson scattering in Higgsless models at the Large Hadron Collider. Subsequently, Gijs worked as a consultant in scientific software development for Alten Netherlands, primarily focusing on the development of a framework for environmental and hydrodynamical model couplings at Deltares. Gijs joined the Netherlands eScience Center in 2016 and has mainly been involved in projects in weather, climate and hydrology. In these projects, he has applied large-scale parallel processing to climate data, worked on multi-scale atmospheric model couplings, and has been focused on improving model performance through optimization and GPU acceleration of these codes. He has had an important role in the production of data for the next IPCC report with the EC-Earth climate model.

Dr. Hanno Spreeuw

Job Titles:

Research Software Engineer

Hanno graduated in Astronomy on the search and detection of low frequency radio transients with LOFAR. This involved the development of (Python) code for source extraction in radio maps. Prior to his defending his PhD, he was a postdoc at the Dutch National Weather Institute (K.N.M.I.) where he analyzed trends in over a century of Dutch precipitation data. After that, he returned to his PhD supervisor to write documentation for his LOFAR source extraction software. Subsequently, Hanno worked for 4.5 years at the Radiotherapy Department of the Dutch National Cancer Institute (N.K.I) to develop software for real-time 3D dose reconstruction from portal images. This software will be used for quality assurance and as a ‘safety net' for patients.

Dr. Inti Pelupessy

Job Titles:

Research Software Engineer

Inti has a background in astrophysics and has published on topics reaching from numerical cosmology, galaxy dynamics, stellar cluster formation to the evolution of planetary systems. He obtained his PhD from Leiden University. After his PhD, Inti did a postdoc at CMU in Pittsburgh on cosmological structure formation. After returning from the US, he joined the development of the Astrophysical Multi-Purpose Software Environment (AMUSE). He developed this research grade software package to facilitate coupled multi-physics and multi-scale numerical simulations. AMUSE is used by students and researchers worldwide to formulate and conduct numerical experiments in astrophysics. His interest in the development of efficient and easy to use methods for coupled simulations led him to head a cross-disciplinary effort to transplant the technology developed as part of the AMUSE project to the oceanographic and climate science domains. This effort, funded by the Netherlands eScience Center, resulted in the development of the Oceanographic Multipurpose Software Environment (OMUSE) coupling framework. Inti's main expertise lies in the field of scientific computing, with extensive knowledge about parallel HPC methods, distributed computing and numerical simulation methods.