Wim Hordijk
Department of Ecology and Evolution
University of Lausanne -- Sorge
CH-1015 Lausanne
Switzerland
 

Phone:	+41 21 692 4269
Mobile:	yeah, right...
Email:	wim_at_santafe_dot_edu

Also, recently I have taken up some professional memberships, in an effort to boost my career prospectives:

• Society for the advancement of useless knowledge
• Editorial board of the Journal of Evolutionary Creationism and Unintelligent Design
• International commission for the verification of irreproducible results
• Atheist forum for the integration of world religions

Incidentally, I have now reached the point of having worked and lived in all six inhabited continents: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Australasia, and also Africa. Only Antarctica is still eluding me, so if you can get me a job there, that'd be cool! (pun intended...)

From Feb-Aug 2007, I was in Cape Town, South Africa, where I worked at the National Bioinformatics Network (NBN; central node) for a while, and also traveled around a bit to see more of the country. Normally I prefer natural beauty over the city life, but Cape Town has a bit of both. The surroundings are quite impressive, with Table Mountain as the center piece. But having to watch my back all the time while walking around town (especially at night), sort of made me feel a bit uncomfortable about living there...

During the month of September, I traveled around a bit more, first attending a very interesting workshop in Cambridge (UK) for a week, and then 2 weeks on Vancouver Island (Canada), mostly for a family visit.
 

During the second half of 2006 I did some more wandering around, and also several bits and pieces of work, both east and west. First I was in Holland for one month, visiting friends and family all over the place. Then I spent one month hiking around in the French Alps (absolutely stunning!). After that, I visited the Methods and Algorithms for Bioinformatics group (with Olivier Gascuel) at the LIRMM in Montpellier (France) and the Algorithms in Bioinformatics group (with Daniel Huson) at the university of Tübingen (Germany), doing some programming-related work in both places. Then I returned to India (see below) for two months to do another consulting/programming project with Abstract Algorithms. Back in Holland for the Xmas holidays, and doing some work at the Computational Intelligence group (with Guszti Eiben) at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam during January of 2007.
 

Another big dream came true when I was able to spend a year working, living, and traveling in India. From July to December 2005, I worked at the Karunya Institute of Technology and Sciences, doing some teaching and research in the area of Evolutionary Computation. This institute is located in southern India (state of Tamil Nadu), about 25km from Coimbatore. Then I spent a little over a month (Jan/Feb 2006) doing a small consultancy project at Abstract Algorithms, an R&D company based in Bangalore (and I was back here again for another 2 months at the end of 2006). The rest of my year in India I just traveled around the country, and also volunteered to teach english to Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala/McLeod for one month (at the Dogga Centre).

India has been quite an experience indeed, in many ways. Not always easy, but I wouldn't have wanted to miss any of it! It sure is a different world altogether...
 

From October 04 until May 05 I worked at the LIRMM, in Montpellier, southern France. I added some code to PHYML, a phylogenetic tree reconstruction program, to perform subtree pruning and regrafting (SPR) moves, including some tricks to make such moves more efficient.

Montpellier has a very beautiful old city center, some of it even dating back to medieval times, great for just wandering around and fantasizing about times long gone. Moreover, most of southern France is very beautiful, including rugged natural beauty as well as impressive medieval towns and castles (or whatever is left over of them). I did several wonderful walking trips in areas such as the Central Massif, the Pyrenees, and also on the island of Corsica.
 

In 2004 I took some time off and just traveled around the globe for a while. In January, I was back in Holland to spend some time with family and friends, and I also visited the Bioinformatics Group at the university of Leipzig (Germany) for a week.

In February, I took off for a 6-month round-the-world trip. First, I went to Santa Fe, NM (USA) for 2 weeks to visit my old friends there, and catch up what has been going on at the Santa Fe Institute. Then, it was time to hang out and relax on some of the beautiful islands of Fiji for another 2 weeks. After that, I went back to New Zealand and traveled around the country for 2 months, doing lots of hiking and camping in the most beautiful and remote areas. Next, I did a grand circuit around eastern and central Australia for 3 months, also exploring the natural beauty of these parts. And finally back to Europe via Singapore, the world's largest shopping mall...

In August I was back in Holland (first time in 10 years that I experienced a european summer again!), looking for my next adventure. In the mean time, I also made short visits to the School of Computing Sciences of the University of East Anglia in Norwich (UK), and the Algorithms in Bioinformatics group at the university of Tübingen (Germany).
 

In 2003, I spent 9 months (April-December) in Christchurch, New Zealand, working at the Biomathematics Research Centre at the University of Canterbury. I was doing some computer modeling and algorithm implementation related to phylogenetics and autocatalytic sets projects. I even managed to get involved in some actual field work, collecting alpine buttercups in the New Zealand mountains! 

Christchurch is a very livable city, and New Zealand is a wonderful country with an abundance of beautiful scenery. Luckily I had plenty of opportunities to explore this amazing country...
 

During the second half of 2002 (June-November) I spent 6 months at the Institute of Physics in São Carlos, SP, Brazil. I contributed to research projects on evolving catalytic reaction sets with genetic algorithms, and on applying measures from genealogy to barrier trees that result from the energy landscapes of p-spin models and of the number partitioning problem. I also taught a short course on C programming. 

São Carlos itself, a small town about 230km north of São Paulo, the largest city in Brazil, is not that exciting. But living in Brazil for a while, getting to know its people and culture, was a wonderful experience. And luckily I was able to travel around quite a bit (both during and after my appointment at the university) to see the natural beauty this country has to offer, for example during a 4-day trek in the Serra da Mantiquera, a Brazilian classic.
 

From December 2001 to March 2002 I worked on a short-term project at the Institut für Statistik of the Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, Austria. I wrote some computer programs to perform numerical surveys of the number of nodal domains of eigenvectors of graph Laplacians.

I'm not much of a city person, but Vienna is actually quite livable, mainly because it is very easy to get out of and up into the hills and woods of the Wienerwald which borders the city. Living here for a while also gave me a chance to do some great hiking in the Alps!
 

For about a year (10/00-10/01) I worked on and off as a contract programmer for dnaMining.com (sorry, link no longer available...), implementing bioinformatics applications (in particular a wrapper around the blast family of programs to optimize search time and sequence alignment results). This allowed me to get my feet wet in the bioinformatics area, and I also learned some neat tricks for implementing a simple license manager (commercial companies definitely have different priorities than research institutes...).
 

During the summer of 2000 (roughly June until October) I worked as a tour guide for Escape Adventures, a mountain bike adventures company that offers week-long trips all over the Southwest of the US. This was physically hard but incredibly fun work, and it allowed me to go mountain biking in the most beautiful and remote places all summer long! The only disadvantage was that the company's headquarters are in Las Vegas, NV, but luckily I didn't have to spend too much time there.
 

From January to May 2000 I was a postdoctoral researcher jointly between the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, and the Santa Fe Institute. I worked on some questions concerning genetic epistasis, canalization, and (the evolution of) mutational robustness. After a much needed break, I was back at SFI as a postdoc in 2001 (see below).
 

From January 1995 to December 1999 I was a graduate fellow at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). There, I worked on my doctorate research in the Evolving Cellular Automata group, and also on other research and programming projects with others. From January to August 2001 I was back at SFI as a postdoc, collaborating on an archaeological project. I did some GIS (geographic information systems) analysis of archaeological data, and implemented a cool agent-based model using foraging theory from the field of ecology. 

Santa Fe, NM, is one of the most wonderful and beautiful places I know of. I lived there for 6 very happy years, and still miss it very much (could someone send me some green-chile enchiladas!!). The state of New Mexico has a very impressive and diverse natural beauty (ranging from deserts to alpine mountain peaks), and is probably about as un-american as you can get within the USA (which is a good thing).
 

In December 1999 I received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of New Mexico (Albuquerque, NM). The title of my dissertation is Dynamics, Emergent Computation, and Evolution in Cellular Automata. See the one-page summary for a brief overview of what it's all about (can't explain it in two sentences...). From the summary page you can also download the entire dissertation (gzipped Postscript or PDF).
 

During the spring and summer of 1999 I worked as a part-time tour guide for New Mexico Mountain Bike Adventures (NMMBA), a company that offers guided mountain bike trips. The tours I've guided are the half-day and full-day rides along and in the Cerrillos Hills, teaching local history and geology and basic mountain bike skills. This was a great excuse to get away from my dissertation work once in a while and go mountain biking through the beautiful high-desert landscape of New Mexico!
 

From May 1998 to May 2000 I was a member of the St. John's College Search and Rescue team. I've done many search and rescue missions with this team, from searching for lost hikers and mountain bikers to evacuating injured backpackers. From these missions, and from the many team trainings, I've gained a lot of valuable outdoors skills and safety awareness. I also got my Wilderness First Responder (WFR) certification through this team. Another great excuse to leave the computer behind once in a while and disappear into the mountains, even if it was sometimes in the middle of the night...

I generally enjoy spending time outdoors in nature, whether it is hiking, mountain biking, backpacking (trekking), or snowshoeing. It's all a bunch of fun! Here are some pictures of a 4-day backpacking trip I did in the Grand Canyon (Arizona), and of a trip to Moab (Utah), the mountain bike capital of the world. These are just a few of the many wonderful trips I've done in the great outdoors.
 

I'm a big fan of surrealism, magical realism, fantastic realism, metarealism, and whatever else that bizarre, out-of-this-world kind of art is called (although not to be confused with the more popular "fantasy art"). Influenced by this stuff, I've produced some drawings myself. Please take a look at my modest collection of personal art. Unfortunately I haven't done much drawing lately, but I hope to pick it up more seriously again at some point. (Does anyone out there need an illustrator? ;-> ).
 

For me, the big adventure of life itself began in The Netherlands (or Holland, the more popular name for the country). I was born and raised in Rotterdam, where I got a degree in Operations Research from the Erasmus University. Holland is a very small and friendly country that's always fun to visit. But I don't know if I'll ever live there again for any extended period of time, cos for me it's just too flat, too wet, and too crowded...