Joris van Heijningen

"In June 2016, a few months after the first gravitational wave detection was announced, I flew with a Dutch TV crew to Pisa to shoot an episode for Klokhuis, a Dutch children’s TV show. Explaining the story of gravitational waves to our target group – 8 to 12 year-old children – was challenging, but I like to think we did a good job. The script we came up with was presented to perfection, and I got a few seconds of fame as the "physics expert" as well. To me that meant quite a lot as I had watched Klokhuis daily when I was a child. The show was aired in February 2017, and a few months later I was pointed to a tweet by a Belgian professor. He had some compliments about the show, but the biggest compliment of all was the drawing his 10 year-old made depicting the concepts we had explained in the episode!"

Joris van Heijningen is a postdoc at the University of Western Australia. He develops instrumentation for the LIGO observatory, and has also installed suspensions and hardware controls for the Advanced Virgo detector. In his time off, Joris likes to make music: he has been playing saxophone since his hands were big enough for the instrument, and he sings rock 'n' roll classics from the '60s in a band. He also enjoys listening to the likes of David Bowie. You can follow Joris on Facebook and LinkedIn.