After graduating from Wageningen University as a geoinformatician in 2011, I joined remote sensing company WaterWatch (now eLEAF) as a junior researcher. It must have been in the year 2012 that I first came across NEO. I attended a number of meetings where NSO consulted industry on the setting up of the National Satellite Data Portal. NEO was also present here as a stakeholder and has now been providing pre-processing of images in the portal for several years.
From 2013 to 2019, I worked as a GIS specialist and project manager for Soil Cares Research, a company that developed services based on sensor technology for determining nutrient levels in soil, feed and crops. Through the IJKakker project, I ran into NEO again. NEO supplied images to Akkerweb within which various applications were developed for precision agriculture.
But I got to know NEO best through our collaboration within the CROPMON project. As project leader, I had the pleasure of working with NEO and a consortium of other companies and (semi-)governmental organisations to develop an information service for farmers in Kenya over four years. CROPMON provided nearly 200,000 farmers with a local weather forecast every week. And crop growth was monitored for more than 35,000 plots (for the crops coffee, sugarcane, maize, grass and wheat).
After Soil Cares Research sadly went bankrupt at the end of 2019, I was employed by Weather Impact (its 'almost' neighbours at Stadsring 57, Amersfoort) for 6 months, completing administrative matters and reporting for the CROPMON project.
Now I am all set to start working for NEO with a clean slate and fresh courage. I will take on the management of several ongoing projects and will start working on new business propositions within the agriculture sector.
In my spare time, I am active as a singer/composer/bandleader of metal bands 'Lord Volture', 'Black Knight' and 'Thorium'. I also enjoy sports (survival runs) and am very interested in history.
