I am being co-advised, which means I have two professors: Professor Paul Alivisatos and Professor Ting Xu. This means I'm working in two fields and combining them, so I work with polymers as well as nano-particles. So, I'm really working in the nanomaterials field.

Even though I am a chemist by training, I spend most of my time in material science and engineering because I mostly work on material science. Specifically, I work on nanomaterials and especially hybrid nanomaterials, where you have polymers and nanoparticles interfacing.

As you go to smaller materials, you can imagine that they're connecting and what is going on between them becomes really important as it’s going to be a major part of the system. So, I study what's going on at these interfaces. I use polymer-grafted nanoparticles and assemblies of nanoparticles, with which we can make really cool structures. You can treat nanoparticles like artificial atoms.

Atoms are like small spheres that are the building blocks of different structures and have different properties. And what we can do is we can make these particles, like the spheres or in our case even other shapes like cubes. They can make structures, they can have different properties, they can have different kinds of bonding.

The cool thing is that when we use nanoparticles, they have a bigger design space than just regular atoms, which are all spherical and have certain properties. So, what I'm looking at, for example, are cubic nanoparticles that are completely different shapes that you would never get from an atom. Because of that, you get different crystal structures and interactions between the particles that are unique to the shape of the particle.

It's fundamental research. It's like, “Oh, we have these materials, why did we choose certain parts of it? What happens?” But also, “How can we connect that to the properties of the material?”

Having this structure-property relationship as well as how we create these structures is the main focus. How does this relate to, for example, mechanical properties? I look at the mechanical properties, because like I said, I have these materials that are part polymer and partnanoparticle. And both have different mechanical properties. When you combine them, you can  get the advantages of both types of material into one material. And sometimes you can even get other types of emergent properties, because of the different behavior of the interfaces that you don't have in either one material, but when you combine them, they get unique properties.

I did the science track in high school (in the Netherlands), of course, otherwise you don't end up pursuing a science major. But honestly, in the beginning I was mostly interested in medicine or psychology. But when I started going to all these orientation days, I realized that I really like the more fundamental sciences. And I feel like chemistry is a cool science.

It connects to so many different fields. It's such a cliche thing that chemists say, but chemistry is everywhere: in biology, physics, materials, medicine. Being a chemist, I feel like I have a fundamental understanding of a lot of different processes and a lot of different fields.

Another thing that I think is unique about chemistry is that it’s a science where we are creating. I get to make new materials that have never been made before. I get to go into a lab and make something. I'm not just like reading literature or learning about different subjects and coming up with new ideas. I'm stepping into a lab and creating something new that has never been made before, and I enjoy that part.

I ended up going to the University of Groningen, and I chose that place for two reasons.

One of them is that, at that time, it had the only chemistry program with the bachelor's degrees taught in English. That was important to me. The second thing was that in the first year, you could study chemistry and chemical engineering at the same time. Because I wasn't completely sure which way I wanted to go, I decided to study both.

I realized after one course in chemical engineering that I did not enjoy that, so I ended up just studying chemistry, but I like that I had the option to try both and see how that goes. During my undergrad, I also tried to explore different things. I spent a semester in Stockholm where I studied neurochemistry, which was a cool experience, but I realized the biology part of chemistry surprisingly wasn’t as interesting for me, mostly because of the type of lab work that it involves.

While I was writing my bachelor thesis, I ended up doing an internship at BASF to experience the industry side, which was also interesting, but I decided I wanted to stay in academia for a bit longer. So, I started my master’s degree, also at the University of Groningen.

Groningen has a few different tracks in their studies where you can choose what kind of chemistry you want to do. When starting my master’s program, I chose the material side. During the two-year master’s program, you must do two research projects, your master thesis, which is nine months, and a second research project, which is kind of whatever you want it to be. It’s around 3-4 months, so I decided, why not go abroad again? I went to Boston and spent 4-5 months there in a lab at Harvard. And that's how I first ended up in the US.

It's really funny, in my first year of undergrad, people would ask me, “What are your future plans?” and I was like, “Well, I'll probably do a PhD somewhere abroad, but not in the US.”

And look at me now! During my master’s, I mostly chose to go there because there was a professor I wanted to work with. It was going to be for 4-5 months, it would be a cool new experience, and I’d never been to the US before, so why not give it a try? And I ended up enjoying it!

I had a fun lab. It was intense, but it was a great experience. Boston is similar in a way to the Bay Area, where I live now. There's a high concentration of great universities, great companies, all close together and working together, and I think that's great. It's a unique atmosphere with a lot of diverse people all in the same place. There's so much going on here, and I don't think that's something I see anywhere in Europe. There are great universities and great companies, but it’s not as concentrated in one area.

Also, just the size of things. It’s just a lot bigger here with a lot more people. There's a lot of international people from all different backgrounds, which you also see in the Netherlands, in universities, but it's different here. So, I really enjoyed that and meeting a lot of cool people.

I think in the US, people can be America-centered. It’s nice to have a perspective and knowledge of what's going on in other places in the world.

For example, knowing what kind of sustainability efforts are going on in Europe, what the European Union is doing with all these concerted efforts to reduce emissions and have better materials that are more recyclable, which are different in approach to sustainability efforts that are happening in the US.

So, I think it is helpful to know what is going on in the rest of the world and to have a  personal connection to that. I think another thing is having a little bit of a work-life balance. The academic atmosphere here can be intense. And it's normal to dedicate your whole life to whatever you're doing, but I think in the Netherlands, we have a bit of a healthier balance - even though you're doing research, it's still more of a nine-to-five, instead of being your whole day, and evening and weekend. So, I try to set these boundaries for myself here and that helps me overall.

It depends on which university you go to, of course, but the universities I've been to have been big and well known. And so, in general, the professors you work with are quite famous and busy.

Getting mentored here is a different experience in than that sense because there's less time for them to spend on you as a student. So, a lot of mentoring comes from older grad students or postdocs.

The track you take in the US is also different than in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, we have three years of bachelor’s, two years of master’s, and then a PhD for four years. Here, it's undergrad for four years, then you do grad school for five years.

And so, for example, I did my master’s in the Netherlands, but when I got to my PhD program here, I still had to do courses and things like that. What I've also noticed is that our level of experience in research is in general a lot higher than people who have come freshly from undergrad in the US.

One of the reasons is that if you've done a master’s, of course, you've researched and written a master thesis for a year. But also, the lab courses here are designed differently. So, you get a lot less intense experience with doing research. What I've noticed is that the first year grad school students here have less experience doing research than people from the Netherlands.

Another thing that is different is in the Netherlands you apply for a PhD position with a certain professor. And then they take you or they don’t. Here, you apply to a department of a university, and then the department accepts you. And then you get here, and start talking to professors. You'll start matchmaking and being like, “Who do I actually want to work for?” And of course, you get there with idea of, “Well, I want to work for a certain person.”

I came here with the idea of working for a certain person, but that did not end up happening. I ended up working with somebody different. And that's an advantage and a disadvantage. Some people end up not really finding their match. It doesn't happen a lot, but every year there are a few people who this happens to.

But on the other hand, now I get to work with different people than I expected, and I got to learn a little bit more about the other professor I wanted to work for and realized, “Oh, actually, this is not the person I would want to work for.” So that was interesting. It also takes time. You spend half a year figuring out where you want to work instead of immediately starting like you would do in the Netherlands. But it's also cool, because it kind of helps to keep your perspective broad.

Even though the US has a quite similar culture to Netherlands, there are still differences. I think one main one for me is if you want to commit to spending five years abroad, maybe try it out for a few months first.

Like I mentioned earlier, I spent a few times, like four or five months at a time, in a different city or a different country, because it's an intense experience to move somewhere by yourself and having to figure everything out by yourself.

And for some people that works well. It doesn't for others, so I think kind of trying that out first is definitely a good choice because a five-year commitment is quite long and can be a lot. I mean, the time difference from the West Coast is nine hours, so you don't get to talk to your family that much. It's a big step. So, I think just figuring out for yourself that that is something you actually want. You're uprooting your whole life.

That's one thing. And then the other thing is because the application system is different, you have to start earlier. Applications close in December for starting the program in August, so you have to start earlier. And part of the application is all these different tests; you need to do an English proficiency test, you need to get a visa, like all that stuff. It takes a lot of extra time, way more than what you would do to go another country in Europe.

So, you have to start like a year in advance, basically, which is not something we're used to. So that's one thing to keep in mind. And the other one is to reach out to people and ask for help. Sometimes I get people reaching out to me ask “How do I get into a school in the US?” I'm always happy to answer those questions. You should reach out to people because the system is so different. And you have to keep in mind that Americans are trained to apply for grad school here. They know exactly what to do, exactly what to say, but we don't.

There are all these documents you need to prepare like a statement of purpose. In the Netherlands, we don't know what it is, we've never heard of that. We don't know how to write something like that. But they know exactly how that's supposed to look and in that way they have a lot of advantages.

So, reaching out to people who have gone through that process, and figuring out how they did that, I think, is important. One piece of advice I got from an American professor at my Dutch university was, “One thing to keep in mind is that Dutch people are taught to be very humble. We don't like to brag about ourselves, but Americans do.”

So, when you're writing a statement of purpose to apply for grad school, brag about yourself and don't be shy. You’re going to compete with people who are used to bragging about themselves and being like, “Oh, I'm really good at this.” You have to match that. Talking to people about these things and realizing how you need to make these changes in the way that you think about yourself, what you research, and how you frame things is important.