“I know a thing or two about building a crane like that”

The view from his workspace on the 17th floor of a Rotterdam office building is just as varied as his job at APM Terminals. When Corné Versteegt looks out of his window, the former TPM student and researcher sees a panorama that stretches from Dordrecht on one side to Delft and The Hague on the other. The dynamism inside is equally great.

The TPM degree programme was still in its infancy when Versteegt started on it in 1994. He had been looking for a course with a technical slant, but which also explicitly handled related aspects. “The interdisciplinary combination of fields appealed to me very much.”

After graduation, Versteegt opted to carry out PhD research on unmanned transport. In practice, it was surprisingly similar to an ‘ordinary job’ outside the university. “I was simply engaged by companies and authorities and I felt like a sort of academic consultant. Rather than merely doing my work on a businesslike basis with an hourly invoice, however, I focused expressly on the scientific background.”

Read the complete article in the Quarterly VIII/3, October 2010