New year? New career!

We’re at the start of 2023. It has almost become a habit for me to switch jobs about yearly, over the last few years. I have never intended it that way, but apparently I needed a few de-tours to find out where I wanted to go. I have not made it a secret that I regret quitting my astro career and I also have alluded to aspiring an academic career. My current job at the University of Amsterdam is adjacent to academia, and that was the whole reason I took it in the first place.

I have done fun projects, learned a lot about the ‘behind the scenes’ at universities and was a willingly active member in the interdisciplinary Data Science Center of the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Some things could have been better (“creating” demand for our work wasn’t overly successful, and support from IT for what we needed was consistently cut back to near zero budget), but I do not necessarily need to change jobs. With my leave, though, I have advised against replacing me by another Marcel. I think the money can be spent better, before another me would jump onto the Advanced Analytics bandwagon again at the UvA central administration. Thanks to all my colleagues at the UvA for an interesting and fun year and a half!

In the post that announced my current job, I described the road towards it, which included a second place in a race for an assistant professorship at a university medical center, shared with a computer science department. In a rather bizarre turn of events (details available off the record), I have eventually accepted an offer that is very comparable, and arguably even better than the position I was originally applying for. That means…

I’m proud to announce that as of Feb 1st, I’ll be an academic again!

I will be an assistant professor of data science in population health at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) at their interdisciplinary campus in The Hague, where they also offer the Population Health Management MSc program.

I’m very excited to be giving a lot of serious education again, and to be doing research in a highly relevant field of science. I have very little network or track record in this field, so I expect to learn a whole lot! Keep an eye on this blog, I might be using it a bit more frequently again (no guarantees, though…). Here’s to a challenging, but fun 2023!