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For my research during my masters and PhD I’ve made us of the rapid (binary) stellar evolution code binary_c, to simulate (binary) star systems. The population-synthesis wrapper that enabled running many of these systems was written in Perl but I decided to rewrite this into a Python based code. The code is well documented and automatically generated based on docstrings, and is available on Gitlab and Pypi. We provide tutorial and example notebooks on how to use the code technically, and how to actually calculate useful things with it on documentation page.

While working on my project on the role of disk mass-transfer in systems with main-sequence accretors I found that in many cases mass transfer occurred with a donor that rotated sub-synchronously (slower than the orbit), although the torques and other properties of the mass-transfer were calculated to occur from synchronous donors. It is important to properly account for this because my goal is to make a correct concensus of how important disk mass-transfer is in these systems, and using the wrong stream properties strongly affects whether disks will form.

During the last phase of my PhD I worked together with Dr. Payel Das, Dr. Simon Hadfield and Dr. Yunpeng Li, on a project aimed at accelerating Hamiltonian Monte-Carlo. This project was quite a cross-disciplinary effort, as we had to combine ideas from (astro)physics together with computer science and probabilistic mathematics. Hamiltonian Monte-Carlo is a Monte-Carlo sampling/inference technique which uses techniques from classical mechanics to guide the sampling through the posterior.

One of the main projects during my PhD was to study the effect of variations on the pulsational pair instability supernova (PPISN) routines on the primary mass distribution of observed binary black hole systems. Current observations of merging binary black holes are uncovering structure and details in the distribution of properties of these black holes. One interesting feature is a relatively high rate of observations of systems where the primary mass has \(\sim35M_{\odot}\).

Table of Contents TODO Add olympiad During my physics education at the University of Amsterdam I took part in many outreach events, most of them organised under the name Physics-Fair. The Physics-Fair is a long running project set up by Paul Vlaanderen, where physics students showcase physics experiments to the public during open days and workshops, and in some cases also in the form of a quiz. When Paul Vlaanderen retired, several students and I took over some of the organisational tasks of the Physics-Fair.