I was born in 1981 in Eemnes, a small village near Hilversum. After finishing high school my decision to study Physics had already been made and I started to study physics in 1999 at the Universiteit van Amsterdam.
Fundamental physics always had my interest. As a kid I always wanted to know how things worked. Through the University of Amsterdam I got to know NIKHEF, the National Institute for Nuclear and High Energy Physics.
From the start I liked the nice atmosphere at NIKHEF and thought it would be great to work on one of those projects with almost epic proportions like the ATLAS-experiment.
 In the summer of 2003 I was a summer student at CERN, Geneva, for 13 weeks. This was part of my “Particle and Astroparticle physics” master's degree. At CERN I learned about the international atmosphere of high energy physics and got to know many physics students from all over the world.
In September 2004, after ending my project with the ATLAS group at NIKHEF, I finally got my master's in high-energy physics. I went on as a graduate student right away, working with the same group.
At this moment I work with the ATLAS-SCT group, where I'm helping to build one of the end-caps of the silicon tracker. This silicon tracker will eventually, together with the other detectors in the inner parts of the ATLAS experiment, reconstruct the tracks of the particles that appear after proton collisions in the LHC.
I hope that at the end of my graduation I get a chance to help analyze data from the ATLAS experiment, which will start its measurements in 2007.
 Like the world of high energy physics, my daily life is also has an international touch. I live together with an Italian grad student who works on LHC-b and a French grad student from the ANTARES-group in a house close to NIKHEF.
After work, get-togethers at home and going out in Amsterdam, I like to relax by doing some drawing and about once a week getting together with friends playing “Advanced Dungeons and dragons”.
|
