University of Groningen
Large-scale filaments and the intergalactic medium Kooistra, Robin Rinze
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Publication date: 2018
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Kooistra, R. R. (2018). Large-scale filaments and the intergalactic medium. Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
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Acknowledgements
Noardburgum, November 2018
One of the benefits of astronomy is that it is able to connect people from many different fields all across the world. As such, I have had the pleasure to get to know many people over the past four years. The Kapteyn Institute has been a great environment to work in and I have called it a home for more than ten years now. Time really passes by so quickly and it is almost time to start a new adventure on the other side of the world. But before that, I would like to express my gratitude to a number of people that have made these four years an unforgetable experience.
First of all, I have to thank my supervisor, Saleem, without whom I most likely would not have been where I am now. I still clearly remember the day you walked by the office I was sitting in whilst writing an exam and you suddenly popped in asking me if I already knew what I wanted to do after finishing the master. At the time I had no idea and was still highly obsessed with getting back to Japan, but when I was in Taiwan a few days later I decided to accept your offer and the rest is history. I am very grateful for the oppurtunity you have given me. I learned a lot from you, both per-sonally and scientifically. I’ve always admired how knowledgeable you are of, it seems, almost anything. Whenever you were in Groningen, there was never a dull moment and I am going to miss all your interesting historical stories during lunchtime, but I very much look forward to continuing our collaboration.
Marta, as my daily supervisor, you have been the person that has had to bear with me the most for the past four years and you survived every
170 Acknowledgements wrongly placed comma along the way! Despite having such different ways of working, we somehow managed to find a good way to work together and I thank you for helping me so many times whenever I got stuck on some-thing. It was great to see how much you have grown during the past four years and I am happy for you that you ended up with a good position in the North. You are an outstanding scientist and a very diligent worker. I especially enjoyed the conference trips we went to and also the workvisit to Saleem in Israel was an interesting experience, to say the least (I will strive to stay away from fastfood during work trips!). Thank you so much for your guidance during my PhD and I hope we can continue to work together for many years ahead.
I would also like to thank my second promoter. Marc, thank you for guiding me through the dark forest that is radio astronomy. It was a great experi-ence, both as a TA, but also working more closely together on Apertif which turned into our seemingly neverending SKA paper.
My gratitude goes out to the members of the assessment committee, Yehuda Hoffman, Thijs van der Hulst and Naoshi Sugiyama for taking the time to carefully read the thesis and for providing insightful comments to help im-prove the thesis.
Despite not working with LOFAR, nor on the EoR, I had the pleasure to be a member of the LOFAR EoR group. I learned so much about some of the technical aspects that all of you have to face in trying to detect such a weak signal. The group meetings on Monday have been very helpful, even if I often got lost in some of the more technical discussions. In particular thank you to Bharat, Florent, Leon and Vibor for helping me at various stages of my PhD. And also thank you to all the other members of the group (Abhik,
Andr´e, Ger, Harish, Hyoyin, Khan, Maaijke, Modhurita, Pandey, Simon
and everyone else) for the great atmosphere and the inspiring discussions over the years.
I would also like to thank my collaborators Elmo and Kelley. Your experi-ence in both your fields were a tremendous help and I was able to learn so much from all the useful discussions we had.
At the start of my PhD I ended up in office 275 (later mysteriously turned into 277). Mustafa, it was a pleasure to have you as an office mate. I really
enjoyed all our long talks after you would come in in the morning with your Subway sandwich every day. I wish you and your family all the best. Ming, I was also lucky to have you to talk to all the time and you definitely sparked my interest in China. I look forward to visiting you there! Caroline, as a fellow Trekkie it was always great to chat with you. I hope you are well and best of luck in your current and future endeavours. Pooja, despite only sharing the office with you for a short while, it was a lot of fun, both in the office and during our adventures preparing for the defenses of the others. I wish you good luck with the remaining stages of your PhD.
About halfway through my PhD I moved downstairs to office 151, the self-proclaimed party office, where I spent my remaining years in Kapteyn and got to know a large group of people. Thank you Sander for being a great friend for so many years. As two of the few people in Kapteyn arriving before 9 am, we often ended up having a cup of tea in the morning and talking for (sometimes too many) hours, which I really missed in the past year. Also, thank you for reading through my Dutch summary and for all the times you helped me find a solution for many of the problems I ran into. Although you left science yourself, you always managed to motivate me to keep going. I wish you and Mirjam all the best. Punya, you were the heart of our office and I am glad to have you as a close friend and a strong support. Thank you for all the amazing times, the great food and for the awesome trip to India for the wedding of you and Suraj. Nadine, it was also really nice to have you as an office mate. The Evanescence concert was one of the highlights of this year. Thank you for the good times and all the best for your future in the Netherlands. I also would like to thank former 151-occupants Ana¨ıs and Fabian, as well as honorary member Suraj for the fun times during our many office dinners and our legendary office road trips. That brings me to my current office mates. Yanan, you have always been the hardest worker in the office, and even if our working days were com-pletely out of sync for most of the time (I remember you coming in one day when I left!), I have always appreciated your company, especially when we were both struggling to finish our PhDs this last year. Thank you for your friendship and for all the great times over the years and I sincerely hope you get a well deserved offer for a postdoc position. Laurent, this brief year it was a pleasure to have you among us and you really helped to cheer the office up when the rest of us were struggling. It was great to be able to geek-out over Doctor Who and the Arrowverse each week, but
172 Acknowledgements most importantly, Killjoys! I can only say one thing, though: ”Beebo want
cuddles!”. Andr´es, it was also great getting to know you in our office for the
last couple of months. I really hope that you will have an amazing time to come in Groningen.
I would also like to show my appreciation for the secretaries Christa, Mar-tine and Ramona for all the hard work and help over the years, as well as Lucia and the computer group, Eite, Martin and Leon. You are the back-bone of this institute.
Shoko, thank you so much for all the work you put into translating my summary into Japanese. I am also very grateful for the oppurtunities you gave me to talk to you in Japanese from time to time.
Inga, after finishing my master thesis I was glad I was still able to work with you on the nice paper we managed to get out of it. But I was also fortunate to have you as my PhD mentor these past few years and it has always been a pleasure to chat with you about anything and to taste your amazing cakes! Thank you for everything.
There possibly are too many people in Kapteyn to all write individual mes-sages to, but thank you to Aaron, Antonino, Avanti, Allesandro, Helmer, Jorrit, Julia, Kyle, Mariano, Matthijs, Mpati, Nika, Rien, Reynier, Saikat, Sampath, Smaran, Scott, Zheng and everyone else for all making it such a wonderful place to work in every day.
Furthermore, I would like to express my gratitude to my other close friends for their support and the amazing trips we had these past four years,
April, Boudewijn, Bruno, Christian, Gerd, No´emie, Kebeh, Haeun,
Ys-brand. Karel, you did an amazing job for the cover of the thesis, thank you so much for all the work you put in! Matthias, I may have moved to a different field, but we still had some fun and very helpful discussions these past years. I hope to see all of you again soon in Tokyo!
Lastly, I would like to thank my family for their ongoing love and support. Thank you to my dad, who has always been there for me, no matter what happened. My gratitude also goes out to my sister and her partner. And finally, my mother, who always pushed me to go for what I believed in. I wish you were still here with us, but I hope I made you proud.
