Academic staff

Get to know members of the teaching staff of Computing Science.

Dr. ir. Marjan van den Akker

Marjan van den Akker is associate professor at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences and a leader of the Operations Research team. Within the COSC program, she teaches the course Optimization for Sustainability (INFOMOFS). Her research area is advanced planning algorithms, robust planning and simulation and includes optimization of planning and control in  public transportation and energy networks. She supervises different PhD and master thesis projects in this field. In her research, characteristics from practice are combined with state-of-the-art theoretical models. She want to contribute to a more sustainable environment, by developing sound algorithms for challenges in mobility and energy. She cooperates with different companies, such as NS, ProRail, Qbuzz (U-OV), and Tennet. Moreover, she holds a joint senior position with KLM within the kickstartAI program and  is scientific director of the Utrecht AI & Mobility Lab

Dr. Wishnu Prasetya

Wishnu Prasetya is an Assistant Professor at the Software Technology Group. His research area is in automated software testing and verification. For example, he supervises thesis projects in exploring algorithms and heuristics for automated verification of the correctness of object oriented programs. He also leads a project that explores the use of intelligent agents for automated testing of interactive systems, such as web applications, but also computer games. These are usually large and complex systems, so researchers usually employ black box approaches, including the said agent-based approach. The challenges are typically in the form of finding a clever way to guide test agents through a huge search space to find bugs and flaws, despite limited information provided by a black-box view. Another subject that Dr. Prasetya recently also finds interesting to explore is using such an agent-based approach to simulate user experience.

Dr. Johan van Rooij

Johan van Rooij teaches at Utrecht University for one day a week besides his work as a senior principal data science consultant at Valcon. His research at the university focusses on algorithm theory, specifically parameterized and exponential time algorithms for hard problems. In industry, he is an all-round data science consultant with experience in Operations Research (production planning, taxi planning and routing, scheduling Automated Guided Vehicles), statistical forecasting (passengers in the NS app), and machine learning (computer vision, amongst which detecting defects on railway tracks - Hendrik Lorentz Nederlandse Data Science Prijs 2018). Currently he works in the Predictive Analytics team at Valcon NL where he works for clients such as Schiphol Airport, The Dutch Railways and ProRail. He holds a PhD in computer science from Utrecht University and a MSc in both computer science and mathematics, also from Utrecht University.