The Career Day is aimed at PhD candidates who would like to explore a broad range of career paths, both within academia and beyond. Through talks by former IPA PhD students and other invited speakers, the programme will address questions such as:
- What different career paths are available after completing a PhD?
- What does day‑to‑day work look like inside and outside academia?
- How do people make career choices along the way, and what do they wish they had known earlier?
Lunch will be provided, and the day will conclude with informal drinks. This will be an excellent opportunity to ask speakers further questions and to connect with fellow IPA PhD candidates in a relaxed setting.
Date: June 17th, 2026
Time: 9:30-17:30
Location: Vergadercentrum Vredenburg, Vredenburg 19, Utrecht
Registration: link
We warmly encourage all IPA PhD students, at any stage of their PhD, to attend.
| 9:00 | Walk in |
| 9:30 | Meet your fellow PhDs |
| 10:00 | Coffee break |
| 10:20 | Sangeeth Kochathara - Systems Engineer @ ASTRON Sangeeth Kochanthara is a computer scientist specializing in the systems aspects of software engineering at ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. He also holds an adjunct position at Eindhoven University of Technology, where he supervises PhD and MSc students. He earned his PhD at TU Eindhoven; his dissertation received two national Best Dissertation awards (from the Dutch National Association for Software Engineering and IPA). His MSc thesis was awarded a gold medal at IIIT-Delhi. His research lies at the intersection of software engineering, data analytics, and machine learning, with applications in domains such as automotive systems, real-time systems, radio astronomy, and business processes. His current work focuses on software engineering for AI and data-intensive systems, particularly data pipelines. In industry, he works on system architecture, requirements engineering, dependency management, and lifecycle planning.
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| 10:45 | Sarmen Keshishzadeh - Group Manager @ ASML Sarmen Keshishzadeh has over a decade of experience at ASML, where he has held roles including software engineer, software architect, and currently group manager. He obtained an Executive MBA from Maastricht University in 2023 and a PhD in Computer Science from Eindhoven University of Technology in 2016. His doctoral research focused on the formal analysis and verification of embedded healthcare systems.
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| 11:10 | Jurgen Vinju - Founder @ swat.Engineering, Senior Researcher @ CWI Jurgen Vinju is senior researcher in the Software Analysis and Transformation (SWAT) group of CWI. He is also a founder of Swat.engineering, a CWI spin-off company and leader of the open-source community around the Rascal metaprogramming language. His research centers on metaprogramming and its applications in domain-specific language engineering and software reverse engineering, with the overarching goal of controlling software complexity. He believes that researchers in Software Engineering should try engineering software, at least once in a while.
https://www.cwi.nl/en/people/jurgen-vinju/ |
| 11:35 | Panel |
| 12:00 | Lunch |
| 13:15 | Avoid mistakes I made, if possible Krzysztof R. Apt - CWI Fellow, Emeritus Professor @ UvA, Affiliated Professor @ University of Warsaw Krzysztof R. Apt is a CWI Fellow at CWI in Amsterdam. Also, he is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and an Affiliated Professor at the University of Warsaw in Poland. Over the years his research interests have included program correctness and semantics, the use of logic as a programming language, constraint programming, distributed computing, and game theory. Apt studied mathematics in Wrocław, Poland, and got his PhD in mathematical logic in 1974 in Warsaw, Poland. He worked in several countries, including Poland, France, U.S., and Singapore. https://homepages.cwi.nl/~apt/ |
| 13:40 | Arjen Rouvoet - Computer Scientist @ TNO Arjen Rouvoet is a computer scientist at TNO specializing in programming languages and (dependently typed) functional programming. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Delft University of Technology in 2021, graduating cum laude. He left academia in search of urgent & meaningful work in tech.
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| 14:05 | Valentina Castiglioni - Assistant Professor @ TU/e Valentina Castiglioni is an Assistant Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology. Her research focuses on formal methods for concurrent systems, including robustness verification of cyber-physical systems, metric and approximate semantics for probabilistic languages, equational logic of processes, and model checking. She also explores applications of formal methods in biological systems. She previously held postdoctoral positions at Reykjavik University (Iceland) and INRIA Saclay–Île-de-France (France). She received her PhD in Computer Science in 2017 from the Università degli Studi dell’Insubria (Italy).
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| 14:30 | Panel |
| 14:55 | Coffee break |
| 15:15 | Afshin Amighi - Senior Lecturer @ Hogeschool Rotterdam Afshin Amighi is a senior lecturer (hoofddocent) at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences and a software engineer with over 12 years of experience in academic and industrial projects. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Twente in 2015. His doctoral research focused on formal verification techniques for concurrent data structures using atomic operations.
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| 15:40 | Hans-Dieter Hiep - Assistant Professor @ Netherlands Defence Academy Hans-Dieter A. Hiep is an Assistant Professor of Cyber at the Netherlands Defence Academy (NLDA). His research focuses on formal methods and automated reasoning, with particular interests in mathematical logic, separation logic, dynamic logic, and interactive, automated, and distributed theorem proving. He also studies operational, denotational, and axiomatic semantics of programming languages. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science in 2024 from Leiden University (LIACS) and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI). He holds a joint MSc in Computer Science (2018) from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the University of Amsterdam, specializing in foundations of computing and concurrency.
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| 16:05 | Panel |
| 16:30 | Borrel |
| 17:30 | End |