About me

Hello. My name is Ruud Visser and I am a postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Ted Bergin at the Department of Astronomy of the University of Michigan. My research focuses on the chemical aspects of low-mass star formation. Combining theory, computer models and astronomical observations, I’d ultimately like to understand how the Sun and the Earth were formed and how life here emerged.

I was born in Amersfoort in 1983 and grew up in Uithoorn, some 15 km south of Amsterdam. I attended the Alkwin Kollege high school in Uithoorn and obtained a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in chemistry at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, before moving to Leiden in 2005 as a graduate student. I successfully defended my PhD thesis “Chemical evolution from cores to disks” on October 21st, 2009 to receive my doctor’s degree. After one additional year as a postdoc in Leiden, I moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in January of 2011.

My hobbies include playing and umpiring baseball, cycling, photography, reading and travelling.

My research

My scientific interests are:

• energetics and dynamics of embedded low-mass protostars
• chemical evolution from pre-stellar cores to circumstellar disks
• photoprocesses (e.g. photoevaporation, photodissociation)
• application of laboratory results to astrochemical models

Publications, talks, presentations

A list of my publications in astrochemistry and computational chemistry is available on the shelf to your left, including PDF copies of most works. This document also contains a list of talks I have given, with PDF copies of the presentations where available. For a PDF copy of my PhD thesis, have a look behind this curtain.