Cover Letter

Native Dutch, I have recently returned to the Netherlands after spending 16 years in the New York City academic, technology, innovation, and humanitarian space.

After receiving my master's in psychology and Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience, I was fortunate enough to obtain a position as a postdoctoral fellow at New York University, where I spent seven years performing research on human visual perception. I was part of the first generation of neuroscientists that applied machine learning to our imaging data, leading to several high-profile publications.

With a growing interest in data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, I decided to take my skills, knowledge, and experience outside of academia, ranging from technology start-ups (e.g., SparkNeuro and CrisisTextLine) to large established organizations (United Nations, Girl Scouts of the USA, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre).

After 15 years away from home and family, I decided to return to the Netherlands and continue my career where it began so many years ago.

I have learned much working with my American and international colleagues across many industries, where I discovered my natural disposition to be able to translate specific needs and wishes into data and machine learning solutions, given ¬my broad range of skills. And I often found myself 'levelling up' team members, offering them new interests, ideas, and abilities. My interests lie at the intersection of psychology and neuroscience, data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, complex systems theory, agent-based modelling, geospatial information systems, and design. I love to innovate. In the past, I have been fortunate to do those things in my preferred spaces: academia, medical research and care, humanitarian causes, urban planning, and anything that brings value to people's life. And I would love to continue to work in those spaces.

For a sampling of my projects, please visit my portfolio section on my home page. In addition, I have created a data science course specifically for those who find themselves in interdisciplinary teams but who are themselves not the engineers producing the algorithms and training the models. It aims to convey the deeper intuition of data science and machine learning, facilitating communication between team members. You can find the course here.

Yours sincerely,

Gijs Joost Brouwer

Utrecht, The Netherlands, 2024