Originally from a beautiful, little island called Terschelling, in the North of the Netherlands, I have a strong passion for creating a sustainable process industry. My group focuses on fermentation, starting from the perspective of large-scale operations. What kind of conditions (and gradients therein) do organisms encounter in large-scale fermentor and how do cells respond to these conditions. To this end, we focus on the use of lifelines – the fluctuations in their external environment that cells perceive during their lifetime inside a bioreactor. In the end, our aim is to improve process performance by optimizing the process (equipment/operating conditions) as well as the microbe (robustness towards industrial conditions).