About

Hi! My name is Stef Smeets, and I’m from the Netherlands.

My favourite programming language is Python. You can find my code on Github. My focus is on data science projects. I specialize in software engineering, data analysis, scientific data visualization, and best practices for python software development.

I work as a senior research software engineer at the Netherlands eScience center in Amsterdam since 2020. We develop pioneering open source software in collaboration with academic institutes around the Netherlands. Click here for a sample of the code that I developed or contributed to!

How did I end up there? #

I studied Chemistry at Utrecht University (BSc & MSc). In 2011 I moved to Switzerland where I obtained a PhD in Materials Science at ETH Zurich. My PhD research focused on structure analysis of polycrystalline materials (mostly industrial catalysts) by combining different experimental (i.e. X-ray powder diffraction, electron diffraction, NMR, and electron microscopy) and computational methods using Python.

Following an interest in electron microscopy and programming, I moved to Sweden in 2016 where I developed software for automated electron diffraction data collection at Stockholm University. The software uses image analysis to detect particles, and orchestrates the interaction between the camera and the microscope to collect diffraction data from thousands of crystals automatically. Beginning of 2019 year I moved to TU Delft as a postdoc to further develop the software and apply it to biologial compounds.