Contact Details

• 📌 Office A330, Etienne Sabbelaan 53, 8500 Kortrijk
• 📧 Look up email address on KU Leuven Who’s Who
• 📚 Publications via Lirias
• 📑 Publications via ORCID
• 🌍 Personal website
• 🌍 Profile on LinkedIn

Questions and answers

What did you study for your bachelor’s and master’s degree?

For my B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees, I studied theoretical physics at the Institute for Computational Plasma Physics at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. In terms of equations, modelling a plasma and the electrical patterns in the heart have a surprising amount of similarity! Lots of methods that can therefore transferred between those two subjects. My research for my master’s thesis was focused on a simplified version of the inverse problem of electrocardiography. In simpler terms, I used mathematics to find where certain conduction defects are located in idealised heart muscle tissue from electrical measurements inside the heart chambers. For this, I used optimisation strategies from both machine learning and the more classical mathematical approaches, such as the adjoint state method.

Why did you choose to do a PhD in this group?

Since I already got to know and love cardiology in my previous studies, it was a natural next step to look for PhD positions in the field. When I then saw the vacancy and figured out that I had already quoted some of the people involved in this project back in my Bachelor’s thesis, I knew that I found the group where I fit in perfectly.

What would you say is your speciality within the research group?

The technical nitty-gritty: algorithms, machine learning, and programming with C, C++, Python, etc. on GNU/Linux. All of this of course applied to the heart! To me it is exciting see how close I can push a computer to its limits for solving the challenging problems popping up everywhere in cardiology.

What is your favorite part of doing a PhD?

I love that I get to on the one hand explore the mathematics of cardiac electrophysiology with Hans Dierckx’ group at KU Leuven and on the other hand get to experience the cutting edge of its experimental side at the Laboratory of Cardiology with Daniël Pijnappels at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands.

What is your least favorite part?

Checking your simulation that already ran for hours, realising that it failed, and therefore having to start from scratch...

What are your hobbies/after work activities?

I like many things such as travelling, video games and water sports. I especially love sailing in all places; lakes, canals and of course the sea! In my spare time, I sometimes even work as a sailing instructor. I like to combine the work trips for my doctorate research with exploring the places they take me.

Do you have a fun fact about yourself that you want to share?

At the moment when I decided that I want to do a PhD, I was picking blueberries in New Zealand’s Far North.