Biography:

"I was born in Ostend, a small town on the Belgian coast in 1978. I was then raised in increasingly landlocked locations which perhaps explains my unreasonable fascination with the ocean. I lived in Antwerp, Belgium until i was twelve. My family and i then moved to Paris, France followed by Duesseldorf, Germany to end up surrounded by mountains in beautiful Geneva, Switzerland. After obtaining my International Baccalaureate, i headed to London, UK to study physics at the Imperial College. As part of my degree, i spent a year at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias in La Laguna, Tenerife. The Canary Islands were a wonderful experience, giving me a foretaste of life in the tropics and also introduced me to the joys of working at a research institute. Astrophysics was not my cup of tea however and i decided to try my hand at physical oceanography. I have not looked back since. I recently defended my master’s thesis, On Simple Global Extrapolations of Topographically-Induced Diapycnal Mixing Estimates, at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. I presented this work at the Hawaiian Ocean Mixing Experiment (HOME) meeting in Kona, Big Island, 2004 and at the 2004 IAPSO-SCOR mixing conference in Victoria, Canada. I also participated in the poster session of the 2005 Tester Symposium at the University of Hawai’i. I have recently submitted a paper on this topic to the Journal of Physical Oceanography and have just started working on my PhD thesis. My thesis will be based on analysis of HOME-data, a large multi-instititutional experiment designed to investigate the loss of energy from the surface tide as it flows over the Hawaiian ridge and how that energy produces internal waves and turbulent dissipation. I participated in the data collection during three cruises between 2001 and 2003 on board of the research vessels Wecoma and Revelle."