Current activities at the department

Starting May 1^st, 2007, Willem is a part-time lecturer, teaching written communication in Dutch to students of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences. In 2009, he introduced the so-called 'Taaltoets', an electronic test for Dutch linguistic skills of the bachelor pharmacy students.

Willem is the secretary of the UPPER Institutional Review Board (IRB). Starting in 2018, he is also the secretary of the Science-Geo Ethics Review Board (SG ERB).

Starting December 1st, 2004, Willem is the UPPER project coordinator, taking care of the development of a system for the UPPER network and of the network itself.

• Supervisor : Marcel Bouvy
• Fields of expertise : Pharmaceutical practice research, Ethics in research involving human subjects, Written communication

Personal background

Willem has an education as a linguist (phonetics) at Utrecht University. He studied the influence of temporal factors (duration, pausing) on the perceived naturalness of synthetic (computer) speech. The subject of his PhD-thesis (Eindhoven Technical University) was perceived prominence of accented syllables in synthetic speech.