Hello! I’m an astrophysicist at the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University in England. I completed my undergraduate studies at the University of Groningen (in my eponymous home town in the Netherlands) and a master’s degree in applied mathematics at Cambridge University, England. My research is in physical cosmology, with a focus on using the large-scale structure of the Universe to advance our understanding of fundamental physics. I remain interested in topics that span the gamut of my first degrees and especially in interdisciplinary applications, such as my work on the topology of reionisation.
Massive neutrinos are one area of significant interest. The left-handed neutrino is the only known form of dark matter, but its particle nature still eludes us. The thermal distribution of the cosmic neutrino background famously slows down the “clock” of structure formation, providing a unique opportunity to measure neutrino properties at low energies. Combining this traditional signature with diagnostics that rely on other mechanisms could break the degeneracy with other parameters that affect small-scale clustering. Testing such mechanisms requires fully nonlinear computer simulations of the neutrino background, for which I developed numerical techniques that overcome the limitations of standard methods. These techniques are now being used in some of the largest cosmological simulations to date.
