Fields of Scholarship
Physics, formation and evolution of massive stars
Studies of massive X-ray binaries
Physics of Gamma-Ray Bursts and Gravitational Wave sources
Instrument development for large telescopes, ground-based and in space

Honours and Awards
1998 - 2003 Royal Academy Fellow of Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (700 000,00 DFl= 318 000,00 EU)
2002 - 2006 Awarded 2,544 Million Euro from different sources as contribution for building X-Shooter spectrograph for ESO’s Very Large Telescope, Chile
2014 Awarded 1,3 Million Euro from NOVA (Netherlands) as contribution for building MOSAIC instrument for ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope in Chile
2019 Descartes-Huygens Prize of the Académie Francaise & the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, awarded in Paris (February 5, 2019)