About Me

Personal

From Cape Town to Amsterdam I enjoy cooking, gaming, reading mostly science fiction (books, seriously!), playing clarinet and spending time with my family. Also, trying to do research and maintain my research software in my spare time.

Work and Research

I am currently a Data and Software Specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Technical Program Manager at the Holomicrobiome Institute. These two positions combine some of the major threads that weave through my work and career: computers, code, theory, models and standards.

My undergraduate studies were in “classic” protein biochemistry, genetics with a healthy extra dose of philosophy on the side. During my Honours and Masters degrees, both which I passed with distinction I specialised in metabolic control analysis with the indomitable Prof Jannie Hofmeyr and later the Triple-J group. During my MSc I also started working as a Technical Assistant for the Biochemistry Departments where I started developing my user support (Windows), network administration (Novel, Linux, Exim, Apache) and the joys of supporting “essential” research equipment that only ran on a specific version of DOS

At the end of the last millenium, and during my MSc I ran into the problem that there was no simulation software that was capable of doing the type of analysis I wanted to continue doing. So my PhD started with the use of a brand new, essentially unknown language called Python (1.5.2). But why teach yourself one language when you can learn two?

At around the same time I also discovered a, then, cool language called Java which had these, now retired, things called applets. These applets, allowed you to add all sorts of interactive applications to web pages! They also turned out to be a solution to a problem that my then, new, Jacky Snoep needed solving. How to let colleagues in the Netherlands run models without installing any software? Armed with the Python and Jave reference documentation this lead to the development of PySCeS and JWS Online The former, the first generic systems biology simulator developed in Python and latter one of the first online, interactive, systems biology simulation systems and model repositories.

To be continued …