About

I grew up in Turnhout, a town in the north of Belgium best known for making playing cards, and have since lived in Leuven, London, Amsterdam and Ghent. In Leuven I studied physics and philosophy at the same time, which sounds more coherent than it felt: one degree ended in a thesis defending panpsychism, the other in working out how much energy a gravitational wave carries. Amsterdam was two years of listening for echoes in LIGO data, on the off chance that black holes have a surface. They probably don’t.

When the pandemic started I joined the modelling group at Ghent University and spent a year building spatial epidemic models that fed into the Belgian government’s advice. That turned into a PhD, joint between Ghent and the University of São Paulo, on cellular automata and network automata: iterate a simple local rule on a grid or a network and see what comes out. Spoiler: almost anything. I handed it in in 2026.

Along the way I taught calculus and differential equations to a few hundred bioscience engineers, wrote popular-science pieces in Dutch, co-organised an international conference on cellular automata in Ghent, and, through two persuasive friends and a stack of books, found Effective Altruism. That stuck. I sit on the board of EA Ghent and I’m moving into AI safety. Here is what I mean by that.

When I’m not in front of a screen I’m in the mountains, behind a pair of turntables playing jungle and tekno as Brak Geboren, or running BHL440, the co-housing I bought and founded in 2021. Fixing the shower counts as running it.