I grew up in a middle-class, midsize industrial town in the Netherlands about 15 km from the border with Germany. My life was not complicated by numerous extra-curricular activities. I spent my free time playing football (world style) or earning pocket money in the local milk factory and as a stand-in mail man. My parents valued vocational training so my choice to go to college in Utrecht, but not an engineering school around the corner, mystified them. Not to speak of emigrating to California for something called graduate school.

Two months after arriving in Santa Cruz, CA in the autumn of 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake cemented my interest in seismology. I graduated after six and a half years, somewhat to my advisor’s chagrin, and moved to the east coast. My wife found fellowship work in a research hospital and I shuttled between Baltimore and Washington DC to visit Carnegie. When funding dried up, we moved to Columbia, SC. At USC I analyzed seismograms from Tanzania, until today the most spectacular waveforms I have seen. One year later, we moved to southern California where I shifted my research focus to the deep Earth. With a postdoc down the hall, I worked on global tomography and various body-wave studies of the lower mantle. I stayed for five years, enjoying the research culture in the seismolab and the surroundings of greater Pasadena. Our neighbors had likable children of the same age as ours so there was no urgency to relocate.

When it was time to move, we choose to live in France to shake up life but soon we had regrets. Notwithstanding superb public transport and affordable healthcare, Paris is inaccessible in a wheelchair, unfamiliar with dyslexia in children, and unwilling to consider foreign medical diplomas. As reluctant Americans with greencards still valid, we asked the same two gentlemen who moved our boxes from California to Paris to return them to California, some unopened.

In Palo Alto, I spent days as a volunteer geophysicist at Stanford and the Menlo Park office of the USGS. I moved my family to Ann Arbor in 2005. We have enjoyed the small college-town atmosphere, overcome dual-career complications, and appreciated sabbatical years in Nice and Rome as reminders that we are innately restless.

Hobbies outside work? Fewer and fewer. Like many in academia, I am glued to my computer. I enjoy watching sports, basic gardening, and, since the 2020 covid pandemic, playing the classical guitar.

2005– Professor; Associate Professor; Henry N. Pollack Chair, University of Michigan
2004 Gap year
2003 Professor, Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris
1998–2003 Postdoc; Research Fellow, California Institute of Technology
1996–1997 Postdoc, University of South Carolina
1996 Investigator, Carnegie Institution of Washington

1995 Ph. D. University of California Santa Cruz
1988 M.Sc. (equivalent) University of Utrecht