CV voor UM website Augustus 2021

Ronald Leonard Westra, PhD (1956, Amsterdam, the Netherlands) studied Theoretical Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics at Utrecht University where he received Bachelor and Master degrees with honors in Mathematical Physics on a thesis on the fractal geometry of dynamical quantum systems (1982). After graduation, he held various positions as scientific researcher in Physics and Mathematics in Academia and Industry, including the University of Amsterdam and the Solvay Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, where he studied emergent complexity in quantum systems.

January 1990 he became Senior Researcher and Group Leader of the Control and Engineering Group of the Research Institute for Knowledge Systems (RIKS) of the Rijksuniversiteit Limburg (now Maastricht University), where he was responsible for the coordination and acquisition of industrial and scientific research projects. In this capacity, he proposed and instigated several national and international research projects in Artificial Intelligence. In this position, in the period 1996-2000, he collaborated as associate researcher at Philips Research Laboratories, Eindhoven, the Netherlands, leading to his Ph.D. degree at Maastricht University in Mathematical Systems Theory and Artificial Intelligence on the subject of Computer Vision and Image Analysis (2001).

In July 1997, he joined the Department of Mathematics of Maastricht University as Associate Professor. Here he was responsible for teaching in Mathematics and Computer Science, Physics and Astronomy, and later Quantum Information Systems, and the supervision of numerous BSc, MSc students, and several PhD students in Physics and Mathematics.

From 2002 to 2019, he initiated research in Systems Biology at and was appointed as Head of the Biomathematics and Bioinformatics Group. From 2002 to 2017, he was visiting Professor at the Faculty of Sciences of Hasselt University, Belgium, where he was active in teaching and research in computational genomics and as PhD supervisor.

In recent years, he became involved in research projects related to Quantum Information Systems and he was appointed Head of the QC@UM research group, a joint research group of the Depts. of Physics and DKE in advanced quantum computing algorithms.
At the moment his research is directed to the foundations of Physics, namely: complex dynamics of nanoscale systems; in gravitational wave analysis with the ETpathfinder team; and as member of Nikhef in CERN-LHCb-collaboration. Notably, he is involved in exploring the potential of Quantum Computing for next-generation physics detectors as the Einstein Telescope and the future HL-LHC at CERN, a research sponsored by IBM research Zürich (CH).