In the Department of Mathematics at the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam, I am responsible for teaching optimization courses and conducting scientific research in the field of analytics and optimization.

This research project is about production scheduling optimization in the biomaterial industry. The project is the result of a public-private partnership between CWI and ENGIE. The focus is on a modern industrial plant producing a large variety of composite biomaterials which are manufactured by combining and processing a substantial number of ingredients. Incoming orders are processed in real time and slotted into a production schedule in order to meet the required delivery deadline. The scheduling problem is complicated because of numerous constraints, chief among them the availability of production lines and the limited storage capacity for intermediate or finished products. Additional scheduling restrictions are imposed by the need to avoid contamination between product runs. Solving this complicated scheduling problem currently requires comprehensive manual intervention by experienced planning experts. As a consequence, it is labor-intensive and lacks flexibility.The goal of this project is to develop new algorithms to tackle the dynamic scheduling problem outlined above. Of particular interest is the robustness of the proposed scheduling strategies under unplanned disturbances such as machine-downtime or the arrival of urgent new orders that need to be processed without delay.

Under the supervision of prof. dr. Bernd Heidergott I obtained my PhD during this period in the field of operations research. Research topics included simulation optimization and Markov chain theory with a focus on applications such as social networks analysis and Google's PageRank.

Teaching different mathematical courses to economics, business and econometrics students at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

During the summer of 2011 I assisted a professor on a research project about making decisions under uncertainty. In this project I programmed different statistical models for clarification purposes.

On a freelance basis I assisted at projects for the department Research and Statistics at the municipality of the city Alkmaar. For example one of the jobs was taking house to house surveys for getting insight into the opinions of residents.

During this internship I was involved in a project for the Dutch railway company NS. The purpose of this project was estimating the number of travelers during parts of the day and at specific trajectories. Using these estimations it is decided how many railway carriages are needed.