Senior Research Software Engineer

Jurriaan Spaaks, MSc

Jurriaan’s main responsibility as a Senior Research Software Engineer is the implementation of inverse modelling algorithms such as DREAM, SCEM-UA, and SODA on cluster computers while improving the usability of these algorithms in the cluster environment.

After completing his bachelor’s and master’s in Earth Sciences at the University of Amsterdam, Jurriaan worked as a PhD in the Computational Geo-Ecology group of Willem Bouten (link). The thesis work covers the application of inverse modelling algorithms such as DREAM, SCEM-UA, and SODA (link) for improved diagnosis of model structure error in hydrological models (link).

Jurriaan divides his time working as a Senior Research Software Engineer for the Netherlands eScience Center and writing up his PhD thesis. His most recent accomplishments for the eScience Center include implementing single-objective and multi-objective variants of SCEM-UA and of SODA on SURFsara’s cluster computer LISA within the eSiBayes project (link, source code). Jurriaan is currently involved in the data assimilation of satellite observations for the eWaterCycle project (link, video) using OpenDA (link), which attempts to simulate the soil water dynamics for the entire globe on a fine resolution.

Besides inverse modeling and dynamic models, Jurriaan has also worked on visualization of spatial data. For this he co-developed the GoogleEarth Toolbox for MATLAB, which has become one of the most popular downloads in the domain of Earth Sciences (link).