I am an assistant professor of astronomy at the Sterrewacht Leiden . I have broad interests in astronomy but most of my work is in the area of the physical properties of galaxies, particularly what can be extracted from spectra.
I have worked quite a bit with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and maintain a web page with physical properties for galaxies in the SDSS. See my SDSS page for more details.
I am also quite interested in integral field spectroscopy and how this can be used both today and in the future to build up a more complete overview of the dynamical state of galaxies through time.
Teaching
In spring 2010 I will be teaching a course titled "Astronomical databases and the Virtual Observatory" together with Edwin Valentijn and Andrey Belikov at Groningen. The details of this course can be found on the dedicated page for this course.
You can find the lecture notes from a similar course on Databases and Datamining in astronomy that I gave in Leiden in the autumn 2008 on this web page.
Computing
I am generally interested in computing at several levels and particularly in new algorithmical techniques that can be used for data reduction and analysis in astronomy. However my computing page mostly contains various routines I have written through the years in IDL and the Perl Data Language (PDL).