About us¶
We are members of the Visualization & XR team at SURF, and are based in Amsterdam. SURF is a cooperative association of Dutch educational and research institutions in which the members combine their strengths to acquire or develop digital services, and to encourage knowledge sharing through continuous innovation.
We support users of the Dutch National compute infrastructure with visualization expertise and software development, on topics such as data visualization, remote visualization, 3D modeling and rendering and use of eXtended Reality (XR) for research and education.
Part of our jobs is to provide courses on topics related to visualization in HPC. This Blender course was originally created for the PRACE Training Center and first provided (in-person) in 2018, and has since been repeated at least once a year. The course is currently organized as part of the EuroCC The Netherlands training activities.
Paul Melis¶
Paul Melis has an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Twente in The Netherlands and worked on topics in scientific visualization and VR at the University of Groningen and University of Amsterdam before joining SURFsara in 2009 (which has since become part of SURF).
At SURF he is involved in several activities related to visualization, including realizing visualization projects for end-users, teaching courses and providing user support for visualization tasks on our HPC systems. As part of the SURF innovation portfolio he is involved in the use of extended reality (XR) for research and education. He likes to use Blender for all things 3D, but also works with ParaView, and sometimes develops a bit of code in Python, C++ or Julia.
Casper van Leeuwen¶
Casper has a MSc in Computer Science from Delft University of Technology where he graduated on the topic of medical visualization. He has been at SURF since 2014.
He mainly works on web-based 2D/3D visualization and loves to work on Blender projects when the goal is to make something look aesthetic! In the past he has also used Unity and Unreal Engine alongside Blender to make engaging demo's.
Ben de Vries¶
Ben de Vries has a PhD in Astrophysics from KU Leuven. He joined SURF in 2019. He focuses on 2D/3D visualization projects using Blender, Unity and general 3D programming.
Stefan Huber¶
Stefan Huber has a PhD in Biophysics from Delft University of Technology. He joined SURF in 2026. He got into scientific visualization through his work on the 3D structure of protein molecules. He likes to do molecular visualizations, 3D printing and since recently also diverged into an AI ethics project, and he enjoys using Blender for 3D visualizations in his work and sometimes also free-time.