About me

Bas D. L. Châtel (born November 7, 1991, in Haarlem) resides in Amsterdam. He started a BSc in Psychobiology at the University of Amsterdam in 2011, drawn to the promise of combining biology, psychology, and behavior. This multidisciplinarity suited him: broad enough to stay curious, yet concrete enough to maintain focus. In the final year, he started a minor in programming and found the missing piece. Coding offered a way to create things, to break complex problems into smaller ones, and to solve them step by step. It felt like being a modern-day carpenter, where one starts with some simple building blocks, and ends up with something worthwhile to be proud of.

In 2017, he started a Master’s in Computational Science, which often made him feel like he was in way over his head. However, through hard work, sleepless nights, and after gaining approximately 20 kilograms, he managed to complete the programme joyfully. The methodological focus of this Master’s was interesting and allowed sampling a great variety of topics.

In 2020, he began a PhD at Radboudumc in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam’s Computational Science Lab. The project followed logically from what came before. It offered a way to use his psychological background and enabled him to channel that through the modeling perspective.

Today, Bas works as a researcher at TNO (Defence, Safety & Security), where he values the opportunity to work on societally important, difficult questions and to bring structure where evidence is messy. Outside work, he maintains this lovely website and a steady training routine which he picked up again during his PhD and has been very helpful in losing those 20kg he gained earlier.