About me

Hello. My name is Ruud Visser and I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Astrochemistry Group of Prof. Ewine van Dishoeck at the Leiden Observatory. My research focuses on the chemical evolution during the formation of low-mass stars, such as our own Sun.

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 on October 21st, 2009 to receive my doctor’s degree.

My hobbies include playing and umpiring baseball (playing at a very low level, umpiring throughout the country at much higher levels), cycling, photography, reading and travelling.

My research

As a postdoc at Leiden Observatory, I work mostly as a modeller on the WISH team. WISH, or Water in Star-Forming Regions with Herschel, is a Guaranteed Time Key Program for the Herschel Space Observatory, launched in May 2009. Led by Ewine van Dishoeck, the WISH team observes water towards a large sample of protostars of various masses, luminosities and ages.

More generally speaking, my scientific interests are:

• low-mass star formation
• circumstellar disks
• polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)
• photoprocesses (e.g. photoevaporation, photodissociation)
• application of laboratory results to astrochemical models

I started as a postdoctoral researcher on November 1, 2009. Prior to that, I was a PhD student from September 2005 to October 2009. The main component of my PhD thesis was a collapse model, simulating the formation of a star and circumstellar disk out of a molecular cloud. I used that model to study the chemical changes that occur during this process. My background is in chemistry, or more specifically in computational chemistry. As a Master’s student, I performed research on the oxidative addition of methane derivatives to transition-metal compounds (using density functional theory) at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and on modelling the chemistry of PAHs in circumstellar disks at Leiden Observatory. In January 2011, I will move to Ann Arbor to continue my research as a postdoc with Dr. Ted Bergin at the University of Michigan.

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.