I am a 32 years old digital engineer living in Amsterdam. I choose to call myself a digital engineer because it appears to be the best match for what I do. I’ve worked as a Software, Cloud and Data Engineer.

I’m currently working at Every Cure as Head of Engineering. We are building a platform to help people with rare diseases by finding existing drugs that can be repurposed for their disease. Before this, I worked almost 4 years at McKinsey & Company in their Quantum Black / AI practice. Here, next to the usual client projects, I led the team that made GenAI available to over 800 technologists within McKinsey, enabling over 100 projects to use AI in their work.

In the coming 10 years, I want to apply my knowledge of digital systems to help us all understand and direct biological systems better. In my opinion, AI and data driven approaches will play a crucial role in understanding the complexity of biological systems.

Background

Academically, my master thesis was on future energy markets, exploring the challenges of energy supply in a hopefully sustainable future. My University degree was a mix between business and computer science. I took the chance of University to explore classes such as Decision Theory and Evolunionary and Behavior Psychology next to my main themes.

After University I moved to Belgium to work for Space Applications Services on an ISS planning project but quickly switched fields to work as a Data Engineer and Google Cloud Specialist for Data Minded. Finally, I joined McKinsey in late 2020.

Skills and passions

Looking at tech, I have a broad technical knowledge of a variety of systems. Drop me in a project that requires numerous systems to talk to each other and work together and I tend to find my way around and get it to work. Recognising the right people to talk to and working to keep my team productive is a key component of this. I am a certified Professional Data Engineer and Cloud Architect for the Google Cloud Platform. I also have a bit of a passion for IT privacy and security. Currently, I mostly work with Kubernetes, AWS, terraform and BigData tech like Spark and Kafka. According to some colleagues I’m also pretty fun to watch interacting with my shell. Happy to share some tricks and learn some new ones as well.

From a social perspective, I have volunteered a number of years in the Erasmus Student Network, where I was appointed as the National Partnership Manager for Germany. In winter 19/20 I volunteered at Hack Your Future Belgium as a coach, teaching web-development and general SWE skills to refugees. I’d like to get back into this a bit more.

In my free time I enjoy a number of podcasts and books (see reading list) as well as water and mountain sports and exploring cities, people and cultures. For the day-to-day, I recently got a road bike which I enjoy as well.