Willeke Mulder

VALCON

Willeke started working at Valcon in February 2025 as a Senior Data Specialist in the Data Science capability. A Data Scientist is skilled in the application of complex data mining techniques, statistical analysis, and building high-quality prediction systems using complex NLP & machine learning techniques.

Main projects:
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Main Responsibilities:
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SPECTROLPOLARIMETRY: TOOL TO UNABMBIGUOUSLY DETECT LIFE ON EARTH
SUPERVISED BY PROF. DR. C. H. (CHRISTOPH) KELLER

Willeke started her PhD under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Christoph Keller, Dr. Frans Snik and Dr. Daphne Stam. The projects part of Willeke’s PhD involved optical knowledge, instrument development and calibration, testing and validation of field measurements, writing code to transform measurements into an efficient data format, design of a prototype GUI interface, data handling of telescope observations (cleaning, reduction), and data mining/analysis of the astronomical objects within the observations.

Main projects:
• Calibrate & test instruments: measure scatter properties of light on biological samples
• Wrote numerical full-diffraction algorithm to simulate & investigate liquid crystal properties polarization diffraction optics [Python]
• Simulated model of the Earth surface and its atmosphere (as observed from space) using radiative transfer of electromagnetic radiation [Fortran & Python]
• Simulated models of astronomical objects’ atmospheres and compared these to telescope observations: using MCMC algorithms to retrieve their atmospheric properties [Python]

Main Responsibilities:
• Writing research papers and thesis
• Presenting work at international conferences
• Performing numerical simulations, data reduction and data analysis
• Experience with working (optics & electronics) in an optical lab
• Writing 10.000+ lines of Python code to simulate, analyse and visualise datasets
• Collaborate with international team of researchers from various scientific backgrounds
• Teaching data analysis in Python to 94 Bachelor and 79 Master students

APPLYING HIERARCHICAL AGGLOMERATIVE CLUSTERING TO IMPROVE SYSTEM HEALTH MANAGEMENT
SUPERVISED BY DR. A.J. (ALBERT-JAN) BOONSTRA

Main project
Willeke had the opportunity to start an internship at ASTRON, in collaboration with the eScienceCenter. She was asked to inspect the System Health Management (data pipeline) of the LOFAR radio telescope, producing large data sets (Tb+ per minute) and look for ways to apply machine learning to improve the system.

Main Responsibilities:
• Studying telescope design to understand the data pipelines and monitor relevant meta information
• Collaborate with astronomy and software team to understand the problems and needs to set up the requirements
• Examine application of various machine learning techniques to LOFAR data pipeline
• Application of Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering algorithm to a measurement dataset

DESIGNING, PROTOTYPE OF AN EVOLVING ASTROMETRIC REFERENCE SYSTEM,
SUPERVISED BY DR. G. A. (GIJS) VERDOES KLEIJN

• Understanding the theory behind and the importance of astrometry in future space missions.
• Research for existing astrometric reference systems.
• Designing an evolving reference system using SQL databasing to obtain a system that can deal with updates of future Gaia releases (and eventually Euclid VIS data).

DESIGNING, BUILDING, TESTING OF THE KAPTEYN RADIO TELESCOPE,
SUPERVISED BY DR. J.P. (JOHN) MCKEAN

• Investigating and determining the required parameters for our system to allow the measuring of the CMB temperature.
• Supporting the building of the horn antenna, back-end and software of the telescope.
• Designing the program turning measures values of the telescope to system temperature plots using Python.

"EXOPLANETS: UNDERSTANDING ALIEN WORLDS IN DIVERSE ENVIRONMENTS"

• Collaborate in and with a team of astronomers and engineers.
• Design an ESA space mission from science case to final satelite requirements in one week.
• "ARISTOTLE - Astrophysical Research Initiative for Space Telescopic Observations of Transiting Large Exoplanets"