I was born and raised in the Netherlands. After receiving my MS degree in Applied Mathematics at the University of Delft, I moved to the U.S. in search of hillier and sunnier places. In 1996 I received my Ph.D. in Scientific Computing and Computational Mathematics at Stanford University. Before returning to Stanford in 2001, I spent nearly five years in Auckland, New Zealand as a faculty member in the Department of Engineering Science.

I’m a professor in the Department of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford, interested in computer simulation and mathematical analysis of engineering processes, and the Director of the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering (http://icme.stanford.edu).
I specialize in renewable and fossil energy production. I am also active in coastal ocean dynamics and yacht design, as well as several areas in computational mathematics including search algorithm design and matrix computations.