Four brothers, one study programme

They grew up on a dairy farm, but they all chose to study Physics at Utrecht University.  Brothers Marius, Hendrik, Hans and Arie-Willem de Leeuw - all four PhD holders - have wanted to know ‘how it all works’ since they were young children. According to the brothers, the only way to do that is to learn more about physics. Illuster spoke with them about their shared interest, which resulted in four very different careers.

Based on their appearance, you wouldn’t immediately guess that Marius (34), Hendrik (32), Hans (29) and Arie-Willem (27) are brothers. And according to them, they also have very different personalities. Marius, who spoke with us from Copenhagen via a live Skype connection, claims to be the calm older brother. Arie-Willem (photo left) is the headstrong athlete, and Hans (middle) is the cheerful joker of the group. Hendrik (right) considers himself to be the rebel: “I always want to try new things, so sometimes you do something unexpected. For example, I have the most affinity with our parents’ farm.”

Arie-Willem: “You often hear that the parents in farm families would like for one of the children to take over the farm someday. We’ve never felt that way.”

Marius: “Our parents encouraged us to finish a good education first. Then we could always decide if the farm was something for us. To them, it was more important for us to follow our own interests.”

One field, different directions

With their choice of studies, those interests proved to be fairly similar, but the brothers quickly chose very different specialisms. Maris’ PhD research was by far the most theoretical: he focused on String Theory, a mathematical model that studies the attraction between the smallest particles. At the moment, he is a postdoc at the University of Copenhagen.

Arie-Willem’s research was also on fundamental science; he earned his PhD in Utrecht last summer on the Bose-Einstein condensate of light. Hans chose for Meteorology, focusing on patterns of precipitation, and is now a researcher at the IMAU. The brother with the most applied research was Hendrik: he worked at the UMC on MRI research into improved treatments for liver cancer. But now he works as a secondary school Mathematics teacher.

You have to be passionate about your research, or you won’t be able to stick with it.

Sacrifice

“I initially made a conscious choice for science”, Hendrik explains. “Purely because I liked it. But if you really want to continue working in research, you have to make some sacrifices. I have a family now, and it became more difficult to combine that with research. If you have a family, you can’t go to work abroad for a few years like Marius.”

“The reason I’m in Copenhagen”, adds Marius from the big screen, “is because I would like to have more security in the future. For example, I’d like to start my own research group at a university, and to do that you need international experience. That’s why I moved to another country with different work. But it does make it difficult to build a close circle of friends or a family.”

Hendrik traded his academic career for teaching a year ago for the same reason. “Working in education is something completely different”, he smiles, “but I also see parallels with research. For example, last year I helped a student pass her exams. She had failed her final exam for Mathematics, so there was a lot of work to do. I sat down with her one-on-one to find out what went wrong, and together we found the solution.  That’s exactly how I’m accustomed to working based on my research background. And the appreciation I got from the student was amazing.”

Hans nods approvingly. “Education is like science, in that you don’t do it for the money. Not that we don’t earn enough, but it’s definitely not the huge amounts you get in business. You choose this life purely because you want to have lots of different experiences.”

Marius adds: “You have to be passionate about your research, or you won’t be able to stick with it.”

That’s what you do it for

All four answer the question: ‘have you ever thought: ‘what have I gotten myself into’?’ with a confident ‘No!’. 

“There are always moments that the research stagnates for a while”, says Hans. “During my PhD research in England, I worked with physics models, but one day I couldn’t get the model to work. I spent hours at of my computer looking for the mistake, but I couldn’t find it. It’s a bit demoralising. But then you find the problem, and you suddenly start seeing results. That gives a huge kick, and that’s what you do it for.”

“Every researcher runs into that problem”, Arie-Willem nods. “That makes it difficult to jump out of bed in the morning with the feeling ‘Yay, I get to spend another long day working on it again!” Arie-Willem already knows that he won’t be staying in the research world. He sees his future more in business, or perhaps with organisations such as TNO, a consultancy bureau or a government agency.

Hans understands that. “As a researcher, you start to reach the ceiling of our current understanding. That makes the work sometimes feel a bit soloistic.” But he has to laugh at the question of whether it is a bit of a lonely life. “No, the idea that being a scientist means working in your cell alone isn’t true. All four of us have full social lives.”

“Exactly”, adds Arie-Willem. “In the science community, you have a lot of contact with your colleagues. There are always people standing around the coffee machine who want to talk about things like the weather.”

Hans coughs. “I have to study the weather every day, so I’d rather talk about something else for a change.”