University of Groningen
Chromism of spiropyrans
Kortekaas, Luuk
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Publication date: 2018
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Kortekaas, L. (2018). Chromism of spiropyrans: from solutions to surfaces. University of Groningen.
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Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude towards Wesley, without whom – apart from the fact that he has given me the greatly appreciated opportunity to do a PhD - I am certain I could not have delivered a thesis that is of this quality at this point in time. Not only do you keep people on edge through teasing remarks (“heh, aren’t you supposed to be working?”), but you are genuinely interested in people’s progress and, moreover, their general well-being. The higher standards you hold everyone to, accompanied by the personal care make it a working environment which I actually do not expect to experience again.
My gratitude also goes out to Ben for assisting in this opportunity that I’ve been given, and for the many fruitful discussions that we’ve had during personal meetings as well as electrochemistry subgroup meetings. In particular your perception on synthesis and synthetic design has been very helpful and inspiring. Thank you for taking the time and for wanting to be my second promotor. I would like to thank my parents, to whom I have dedicated this thesis. Their hard work and constant support and love throughout my whole life have gotten me to where I am right now, giving me the confidence to seize opportunities and succeed, as well as serving as inspiration being the true role models they are. Trailing close behind, while maybe holding back a bit more on the love part on the surface, are my brothers. Tim, you are and will always be my big brother, and Fabian, I’m sorry to say but you are in fact my little brother, though admittedly I do look up to the both of you in ways.
To my girlfriend Hanne I would like to say one thing: Some challenges in life may be hard to overcome, but in you I’ve found someone to face them all together. Thank you for your support, endless love and so much more, and let’s keep it going for a little while. Also special thanks to your family in Nijmegen, who I’ve from the start felt at home with, for their support and kindness over the years, as well as that of your further kind relatives and friends.
Thanks to my own close family - the Kortekaas’jes and Termeer’en - for additional support and leisure, as well as that of my friends. I’ve often been told it is important to balance your work with social life. And for that matter, big thanks as well to de Groene Uilen and all of my teammates and the staff over the years for the ultimate pastime. You all made it possible to play basketball at a suitable level as the perfect outlet to work. Having to miss it next year is going to create a hole that’s hard to fill. Special shout out to Robbert in particular for sharing my interest in board games as well, to the point where we’re (still, almost there!) finishing up developing a game ourselves. My sincere gratitude goes out to the reading committee as well - Professor Bell, Professor Venturi and Professor Otto – thank you very much for taking the time and effort to go through my thesis (and approve it).
Many thanks to all of my colleagues over the years, making the labs and offices a pleasant environment fit for getting work done in a comfortable manner. Thanks to Juan for racing with me to the finish line so that we could both finish with time to spare, though we found out that someone was adding fuel to the fire no matter our progress – Wesley: “you better get a move on because Juan/Luuk is ahead of you” (cross out whoever he was talking to, this was found to occur both ways on the same day too). Thanks Tjalling for taking over the gelation projects thus letting me off the hook (I think) to invest time in other valuable projects. Thanks Jorn for your interest in
141 my area, I hope but also foresee that when I’m done here you will have much success still, and not just so I can possibly be a co-author on a few occasions (I will, however, always be available for discussion).
Thanks to Marco for becoming a sparring buddy for electrochemistry discussions and joining me in (not so eventful) Southampton for the electrochemistry summer course.
My thanks to Francesco and Davide for clowning up the lab with their fantastic Italian personalities. Special thanks to Francesco also for always being the involunteer scapegoat of Wesley so that he could verbally blow off steam to you instead of us, even after your contract was up. Thanks to Daniël also for contributing to the lab environment while being an attentive and good student and for believing in my supervision. I hope our projects will come to fruition while I’m still here in the next few months, but otherwise I’m sure things will work out with your drive and in Jorn’s competent hands.
Many thanks to both Hella and Oleksii for showing me the ropes back in my masters, I think you can say I hit the ground running at the start of my PhD. My thanks to Hans de Boer for his valuable input throughout and his critical standard which helps make both lab- and paperwork that bit better, and for lending me some office space to quietly write up my thesis. Thanks to Pieter and Johan for their expert help with some of the NMR measurements, especially those of the last few chapters.
Thanks to the rest of the Brownies, Hans, Linda, our Danish adoptee Christina, Florian, Hanneke, Hanan, Andy, Mahsa, Alessia, Maurits and Ruben, also for making these last months/years so enjoyable, as well as Nikki, Emma, Appu, Pattama, Jia-Jia, Shaghayegh, Peter, Duenpen and Sandeep for paving the way in the group.
Thanks to all further students and interns over the past years for their contribution to the Browne-experience. Thanks to the group of Edwin Otten also for the cozy Inorganic Chemistry Department activities and to Oetze, our workshop do-it-all. Further thanks to Jochem and Federico, and Denis and Davide from the University of Nantes for their valuable contributions to my chapters and papers. Thanks to you, the reader, for showing such extensive interest in my acknowledgements, in which I’ve put a more sizable amount of time than predicted beforehand. And last but not least, thanks to the university’s GROS chemical catalogue system for showing me how boring filing chemicals can be, and teaching me to appreciate actual research that much more.
