Academic

I am a physicist working on problems at the intersection between quantum physics and machine learning (see my research). I am also a quantum game designer. That means I think about game mechanics that are based on quantum physics, but also that I try to convert real research problems into games so that clever and powerful AI methods can solve them.

A summary of the places I have studied and worked at can be found via my ORCID profile. A more detailed resume detailing my awards and other skills can be found here soon, too.

I started my studies in Leiden (Netherlands) and worked with Prof. Dr. Dirk Bouwmeester for my BSc. and Prof. Dr. Carlo Beenakker for my MSc., then left for Zurich (Switzerland) in 2012 to do my PhD with Prof. Dr. Sebastian Huber. I was an independent postdoc at Caltech (California, USA) working with Prof. Dr. Gil Refael, and was supported by grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation. After that I held an assistant professor position at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and finally came full-circle back to Leiden at the end of 2022 for a tenure track position.

Personal

I grew up in The Netherlands, in a city near Rotterdam. My full name is actually Everard, for which Evert is a common abbreviation (and is the name I usually go by). My last name is essentially the Dutch equivalent of Newcastle/Neuenburg/Neuchatel.

In my spare time I usually have many short-lived hobbies. Oftentimes this means I have phases (pun intended) in which I do origami for a while (see below), bake bread or attempt to learn a new language. A hobby I’ve been enjoying since I was much younger though, and one that I managed to stick to, is playing (story-based) video games. Talk to me about those at any time. I started combining (video) games and quantum physics because of that!