As the coordinator of the new Communication Skills Academy (Coska), a joint initiative of the Graduate Schools of Life Sciences and Natural Sciences, I am working on designing and implementing academic writing courses for master and PhD students. The goal of Coska is to use all the advantages of asynchronous and synchronous forms of E-learning to create courses that are effective, didactically strong, and widely accessible for all master and PhD students of the GSLS and GSNS. In the future, the Coska also aims to facilitate courses for other forms of academic communication.

My background is in Applied Physics, and after completing my masters at the Eindhoven University of Technology, I worked for 4 years at Philips Research in Eindhoven. In 2010, I obtained a PhD degree for my work there on the characterization of superparamagnetic particles and biochemical bonds in magnetic biosensors.

Because of a passion for both teaching as well as helping people, I decided to not continue in research but follow another master program in Science Education and Communication at the Eindhoven University of Techhnology, and I got to work as a physics teacher in several high schools since 2011. Then in 2016, pursuing another major passion of mine for meditation and yoga, I moved to a centre for consciousness growth in Trinidad & Tobago. I spent about 3 years there within the next 5 years working as the Director Global Education programs, teaching physics in The Netherlands in between.

Being mostly driven by the development and innovation of education programs, which high school teachers have little time for, I am very happy to have now found a position where I can work on exactly that!