[Education] -- [Career] -- [Future] -- [CV] -- [Publications] -- [Teaching] -- [Software]
A computer scientist by training, an evolutionist by historical accident, an academic against better judgement, and a professional wanderer by choice. That pretty much sums it up!
Education
My undergraduate studies were in Operations Research at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands, where I got a solid education in both computer science and mathematics. After that, I went to the USA to work at the Santa Fe Institute (the "Mecca" of complex systems research), and to pursue my graduate studies in Computer Science at the University of New Mexico. I obtained my PhD in December of 1999.
Career
As a computer scientist, I have worked together with biologists, physicists, mathematicians, economists, and even archaeologists, on a wide range of research and computing projects. I guess I'm an academic, although I don't devote my career to a particular research project or field. Instead, I have specialized in being a generalist, and I usually provide computational support to ongoing projects in the form of developing and implementing algorithms, designing and running computer models and simulations, and general programming and computing support. Most of my work is somehow related to evolution, although primarily from a computational point of view, and is generally quite interdisciplinary. I also proved a mathematical theorem once, but one is more than enough for me... ;-)
| - Evolutionary computation | (genetic algorithms, fitness landscapes) |
| - Complex systems | (cellular automata, emergent computation) |
| - Artificial intelligence | (neural networks) |
| - Computational biology | (evolution, autocatalytic sets, origin of life) |
| - Bioinformatics | (phylogenetics) |
| - Agent-based modeling | (foraging behavior) |
Outside of my "computational career" I have occasionally tried to combine my love for the great outdoors with my professional life. I have worked as a mountain bike tour guide for two seasons, been a member of a search & rescue team for two years, spent over a month hiking around in the New Zealand mountains collecting buttercup specimens for a biologist colleague, and collected soil samples at 2000-3000m altitude in the Swiss alps for another biologist colleague.
Future projects
I'm always interested in finding new research, teaching, or consulting projects where my scientific and computational skills and expertise can be applied in a useful way. More specifically, I offer computational services to science and business on a freelance/consulting basis as SmartAnalytiX.com (click link for more details).
CV
For a formal overview of my career as a wandering scientist, my curriculum vitae (CV) can be viewed as html or downloaded as PDF:
Publications
Since most of the projects I have worked on are short-term, with lots of time for traveling in between, I probably don't have as many publications as I could have had with a "regular" academic career. But I usually manage to get a few papers out of every project, so just enough to be on the surviving side of the "publish or perish" divide. A complete list of publications can be viewed as html (including links to the individual papers) or downloaded as PDF:
Teaching
I have presented many seminars and special lectures on topics related to my own research, and taught an occasional computer science class as well. Check out the complete list of lectures and courses I currently have available to see if there is anything of your interest.
Software
Most of the software I have written is just for personal (research) purposes, but there are also several publicly available software projects I have contributed to.
I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists,
not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.
--- Albert Einstein