Curriculum Vitae

Summary

Doctor in Mathematics, currently employed as system engineer of the high performance cluster at KU Leuven, and as visiting professor Mathematics at UHasselt, teaching Analysis and Linear Algebra. Looking out for new intellectual challenges. Area of interest: applied mathematics - machine learning - interface between system engineering and science. Father of Hester (2y) and Wannes (4m).

Competences and skills

• Product owner: At KU Leuven, I am product owner for the central infrastructure with respect to research. This ranges from maintaining the high performance clusters, over issuing tenders for new clusters or storage, to working out solutions for research data management. I draw up the long-term strategy together with the stakeholders, and I translate this to short term plans and indicate which tasks are prioritized.
• Expert: I started system management as a hobby, and trained myself to be an expert in this job. I mainly focus on tasks that require a bew approach - because there is no software available that meets the expectations, or because the existing software has certain restrictions. This ranges from custom software for the deployment of servers - because the existing solutions don’t scale or aren’t sufficiently safe - to software that is able to copy files efficiently from one parallel file system to another - because the existing tools would run 20 times slower and would not be ready inside a maintenance window.
• Teaching: As visiting professor at UHasselt, I teach mathematics courses to students mathematics and computer science. During my PhD I translated abstract mathematics into a comprehensible talk aimed at different audiences.

Experience

• 2019—now: Product owner central infrastructure for research (HPC, RDM) at KU Leuven
• 2018—now: Visiting professor mathematics (part time) at UHasselt
• Linear algebra for students computer science
• Analysis for students mathematics
• 2017—now: Systeem engineer Linux at KU Leuven
• High Performance Cluster: deployment of servers, scheduler (Moab/Torque), monitoring (Sensu), parallel file systems (GPFS, Beegfs, Lustre), Jupyterhub
• CI/CD: Jenkins, Docker, Hashicorp Nomad/Consul/Vault, JFrog Artifactory
• Databases: mysql, redis, elasticsearch
• Message broker: Rabbitmq
• Scripting: Golang, Ruby, Python
• 2016—2017: Postdoctoral researcher at Université Paris—Sud, Orsay
• 2012—2016: Research Assistent of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), at KU Leuven
• Teaching experience for several bachelor courses
• Co-supervised a master thesis
• 2008—2012: ICT-responsible in the student organisation Wina representing all students in Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science — Voluntary (2008—2012)
• 2011: Student job at KU Leuven (2011) to supervise exercise sessions mathematics

Education

• Doctor of Science (PhD): Mathematics — KU Leuven (2012—2016, defended on June 21, 2016)
• Dissertation title: Classification of type III Bernoulli crossed products
• Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Stefaan Vaes
• Master of Science in Mathematics, research option — KU Leuven (2010—2012)
• Title of master thesis: The answer to Atiyah’s question: Irrational $L_2$-Betti numbers
• Degree: Summa cum laude with congratulations of the Board of Examiners
• Bachelor of Science in Mathematics, minor computer sciences — KU Leuven (2007—2010)
• Degree: Summa cum laude with congratulations of the Board of Examiners

• Fullness and Connes’ $\tau$ invariant of type III tensor product factors. With Cyril Houdayer and Amine Marrakchi. J. Math. Pures Appl. 121 (2019), 113-134. doi