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About me
After 18 years in consulting and academia, I now ply my trade as a freelance Tech Lead specializing in A.I. and Machine Learning. I have a strong track record in bringing A.I. and ML systems to production, which I attribute to my belief that designing robust systems (A.I. or otherwise) requires knowledge of more than just the components of the system. To design for privacy, security, reliability, and scalability, I have found it necessary to call upon a firm understanding of the inner workings of the underlying technology, from hardware and operating systems to cloud infrastructure and solutions. As a Manager and in leading project teams I find it important to build a non-hierarchical culture of trust and collaboration. In my experience that is the best way to encourage a good, collective sense of ownership among team members.
Education
I received my Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Leiden (Netherlands) specialising in Neuropsychology before reading Cognitive Neuroscience at the Radboud University in Nijmegen (Netherlands), during which time I co-founded the student journal Nijmegen CNS. I did my Master’s research project on bilingual speech recognition at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Dr. Peter Indefrey, graduating in September 2006. From October 2006 to December 2009, I conducted my PhD research on spoken word recognition in non-native sentence contexts at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Donders Institute, culminating in a PhD thesis entitled: “Lexical interactions in non-native speech comprehension: Evidence from electro-encephalography, eye-tracking, and functional magnetic resonance imaging”, which I publicly defended on March 16th, 2011.