I am born and bred in the little village Oudesluis in the North-West of the Netherlands. After my primary school ‘OSG de Bijenkorf’ and my highschool in Schagen: ‘GSG Schagen’, I studied Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology. I became a member of the student rowing club ‘Proteus-Eretes’ (see ‘Board‘) and graduated in 2006. After my graduation I continued my graduation project: the re-design of a TASAR silk reeling machine for poor rural women in India. More about this project you can find when you click the ‘India Project‘ tab. The reeling machine is now patented and named ‘Anna Charkha‘. Currently 156 machines are running in 7 villages in rural Jharkhand and Bihar.
After this project I worked for two years as an environmental consultant for the consultancy and engineering company MWH, and right now I returned to my old faculty to do my PhD on product development for the poor in developing countries (see ‘Current and past activies‘ for more information)
