I am an assistant professor of astronomy at the Sterrewacht Leiden . I have broad interests in astronomy but most of my work is in the area of the physical properties of galaxies, particularly what can be extracted from spectra. Feel free to have a look at my CV for some details.

I have worked quite a bit with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and maintain a web page with physical properties for galaxies in the SDSS. See my SDSS page for more details.

I am also quite interested in integral field spectroscopy and how this can be used both today and in the future to build up a more complete overview of the dynamical state of galaxies through time.

Teaching

In spring 2012 I teach a course on galaxy formation. I also taught that course in the spring of 2011.

I also teach course(es) related to databases in astronomy. I tought a course in the autumn of 2011, see computing page mostly contains various routines I have written through the years in IDL and the Perl Data Language (PDL).