The SCM team

The entire SCM staff is passionate about empowering your research with our computational chemistry tools. Our senior software developers and technical business staff all have a PhD in theoretical chemistry. Since our developers have decades of experience in developing our Amsterdam Modeling Suite on a daily basis, they offer excellent technical support to beginning and experienced users alike.

We are keen on making computational chemistry work for you, so we love to discuss how:

the Amsterdam Modeling Suite can tackle your modeling needs
we may collaborate in an EU project
we can assist you with implementing new functionality

Prof. Evert Jan Baerends – Founder and Scientific Adviser

As one of the original authors of ADF, Prof. Baerends has overseen many improvements in ADF and BAND by his students and post-docs. With a strong grasp of theory and applications, he has been widely recognized by experimentalists and theoreticians alike (H-index 90) for his visionary work to use computational methods to gain insight in chemistry and materials. As one of SCM’s partners, Evert Jan still acts as a scientific adviser.

Dr. Stan van Gisbergen – CEO

Under supervision of Prof. Baerends and the late Prof. Snijders, Stan implemented TDDFT in ADF, winning the 1998 DSM award for best Ph.D. Chemistry and Chemical Technology thesis in The Netherlands. Stan worked for two more years as a post-doc speeding up ADF before joining SCM, where he has been the CEO since 2001. Stan oversees the development and marketing of the ADF Modeling Suite by initiating, stimulating, and facilitating academic and business collaborations.

M.Sc. Frieda Vansina – Office Manager

Frieda became our office manager in early 2009. Frieda is in touch with all our users and partners regularly, concerning support, price quotes, invoices and license files.

Mrs. Kitty Kleinlein – Office Manager

Kitty had been our office manager from 2003-2006. She rejoined SCM in 2013 to help out with various office-related matters such as financial administration.

Dr. Fedor Goumans – Business Developer

Fedor has been applying computational chemistry to various areas during his M.Sc., Ph.D. (2005), and post-doc, mostly in experimental groups (photochemistry, organometallics, astrochemistry). He also appreciates the difficulty of method development after his VENI project in the theoretical chemistry group in Leiden. Fedor joined SCM in 2012 as business developer and loves to discuss how your research problems may be tackled and learn which improvements you would like to see in our next ADF release.

Dr. Sergio López López – Scientific Partner Manager

Sergio obtained his Ph.D. summa cum laude (2007), studying computationally the photodissociation of van der Waals complexes. Subsequently, he worked on development of the quantum dynamics MCTDH code for three years (Potsdam & TU München). Sergio then moved to London, where he worked as researcher and lecturer at the UCL and as senior scientist for Quantemol. He joined SCM in 2014 as scientific partner manager, to streamline collaborations including EU projects. Sergio also facilitates improving development processes for the ADF Modeling Suite.

Dr. Ole Carstensen – Support Scientist

Ole modeled the dynamics of photoswitchable molecules, receiving a Ph.D. in 2014 with Prof. Hartke in Kiel. He then joined SCM as a support scientist. Ole has been working on improving usability (graphical interface, scripting) and implementing new functionality in ReaxFF. Ole also represents SCM at conferences and workshops.

Dr. Olivier Visser – Software Developer

Olivier obtained his Ph.D. in 1992 in relativistic quantum chemistry with Prof. Nieuwpoort in Groningen. His interests moved from traditional research work to software development, leading to postdoc positions in Groningen and Amsterdam. At the VU he started working on the ADF parallelization project, joining SCM in 1995. The last decade Olivier primarily develops and supports the integrated graphical interface for the ADF Modeling Suite.

Dr. Erik van Lenthe – Software Developer

Erik developed the efficient and accurate ZORA method for dealing with relativistic effects, resulting in his Ph.D. in 1996. In subsequent post-docs with Prof. van der Avoird (Nijmegen) and Prof. Baerends, he implemented relativistic methods for EPR, NMR and TDDFT. Since joining SCM in 2003 he has also become involved in basis sets and density fitting, hybrid functionals and other detailed algorithms inside ADF, as well as the post-ADF fluid thermodynamics module COSMO-RS.

Dr. Alexei Yakovlev – Software Developer

Alexei extensively worked on modeling zeolite catalysis (Ph.D. 1999 with Zhidomirov, Novosibirsk, post-doc with Prof. van Santen, TU Eindhoven) before joining SCM as a scientific software developer. Alexei optimizes and implements algorithms in ADF, DFTB, and ReaxFF. He is also our primary expert on many technical aspects of the ADF Modeling Suite: optimizing hardware performance, debugging, porting, linking & packaging, merging code from external developers and much more.

Dr. Pier Philipsen – Software Developer

Pier’s thesis work (“Solids and Surfaces”, 2006 with Prof. Baerends) significantly improved our periodic DFT code BAND. After a few years in other software companies, Pier returned to SCM to continue development in BAND. He works on all aspects of the code, including speed-ups, the graphical interface, technical details and new features. Pier is also involved in DFTB, in particular periodic calculation and DFTB parameterization against BAND data.

M.Sc. Mirko Franchini – Software Developer

Mirko worked on Green’s functions for electronic transport in mesoscopic systems, receiving his M.Sc. in theoretical physics in 2011. Mirko has implemented many important technical improvements in ADF and BAND which will soon result in a Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry with Prof. Visscher as an advisor. He will continue to work on many technical aspects in ADF and BAND as well as improving the documentation.

M.Sc. Hans van Schoot – Software Developer

Hans studied metadynamics during his Bachelor and implemented GPU acceleration in ADF during his Masters, obtaining a M.Sc. in theoretical chemistry at the Vrije Universiteit in 2012. He joined SCM just after that as a software developer. Hans works on various technical projects (porting, debugging, continuous integration and testing, python scripting) within the ADF Modeling Suite.

Dr. Thomas Soini – Software Developer

Thomas obtained his Ph.D. in the group of Prof. Rösch at the TU München. He was studying transition metal clusters with DFT methods with reduced self-interaction and working as main developer of the program ParaGauss before joining SCM in 2015. Currently, Thomas is extending and optimizing DFTB, BAND, as well as SCM’s scripting tools for transition state search and geometry optimization.

M.Sc. Laurens Groot – Software Developer

Laurens received his M.Sc. in theoretical chemistry in 2015, improving MO level diagram visualization with ADFGUI. At SCM he continues to work on implementing new features and improving the usability of our graphical user interface.

M.Sc. Michał Handzlik – Software Developer

Michał received his M.Sc. in computer science and B.Sc. in theoretical chemistry at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow in 2010. He joined SCM in 2013 and has been working on Python scripting and workflow automation tools. He is the main developer of PLAMS library. Recently he has been focusing on applying machine learning techniques in quantum chemistry.

Dr. Robert Rüger – Software Developer

Robert studied theoretical physics at the University of Frankfurt, working mostly with Monte Carlo methods in statistical and solid state physics for his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees. At SCM he developed and implemented fast approximate exited state methods during his Ph.D., which he successfully defended in 2018. He now maintains and expands our DFTB implementation and also works on the modernizing our codebase.

Dr. Nick Austin – Software Developer

Nick completed his PhD with Prof. Sahinidis at Carnegie Mellon University, working on Methodologies for computer-aided molecular and mixture design. At SCM, he is extending the COSMO-RS and COSMO-SAC capabilities in the ADF Modeling Suite to deal with much larger systems such as polymers.

Dr. Tomáš Trnka – Software Developer

Tomáš is finalizing his PhD in biomolecular chemistry with Prof. Koča at the Masaryk University in Brno where he worked extensively on QM/MM and ReaxFF methods. At SCM, he is accelerating ReaxFF molecular dynamics, so that much longer timescales are accessible.