In the function of "maker" I organize creative workshops for children. The goal is to let children experience a creative learning experience, driven from their own curiosity. I support them in their quest by facilitating their technical needs and feeding suggestions if some direction is needed.

“Uit de buurtfabriek” (literally: from the neighborhood factory) is a woodworking workshop in which I facilitate volunteers to build wooden products. Most of our volunteers are unemployed and value ’Uit de Buurtfabriek’ for its structure, atmosphere and contribution in terms of creating tangible value. I very much enjoy exchanging woodworking techniques and ways of life with my team.

My interest in and sense of responsibility towards preventing climate change has made me decide to take on a freelance part time job in doing LCA's (Life Cycle Analyses). In this role, I analyse the environmental impact of a product by collecting data such as used materials, energy usage, transport distances, waste streams etcetera. By using specialized software (Ecochain), we calculate a.o. the global warming potential, according to the latest international standards. The analysis leads to an advice on how to lower the impact of the product and in most cases in the publication of an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD). This EPD is an international, objective measure to be able to compare the environmental impact of different products. Since more and more customers such as governments are asking for these EPD's, companies are motivated to optimize their production to remain competitive. Since I strongly believe in the significance of this system, I'm motivated to help keep it in motion and push for improvements when possible.

Working in high tech development projects. From making a list of demands to (concept) designing, prototyping, testing (a.o. functional qualification and lifetime testing) and introducing the (re)designs into the supply chain.Main projects of the last 3 years have been (in chronological order):- Redesigning a planar electric motor to be able to robustly withstand higher thermal and mechanical loads.- Designing the tooling and assembly procedure for an other planar electric motor, with extra focus on improving the gluing processes.- Supporting our service departments abroad (South Korea & Germany) on site for several months.- Full mechanical design (concept & detail) of a linear actuator with gravity compensation function with very stringent mechanical, dynamical, electromechanical, thermal and safety requirements. This project meant being responsible for constantly balancing the design for optimized manufacturability, serviceability, reliability and cost while being able to meet all requirements. A lot of cooperation took place to align with stakeholders of interfacing modules and specialists who needed to provide information or perform actions on my behalf.- Designing crash dampers, focussing on acquiring the exact load cases for proper qualification and assisting the supplier in building competence for products with rubber-metal adhesion, mainly with process and tooling reviews and supporting (thermo-)mechanical FEM analyses. This project ran in parallel with the linear actuator design.

I received my Bachelors degree with a final project that I did for Total Support. The project was to individually find ways for cost reduction of a street sweeper truck. The job included a very elaborate mechanical FEM analysis of the full structure of the vehicle to locate those parts where the amount of material could be reduced. After this project I was offered a job and quite quickly ended up working for ASML which offered me to go on direct payroll later.