We started a  collaboration between our consortium members and teachers from the teacher education program of Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. A network is set up by Marijn van Nijhuis (see WP 7) to both get researchers into teacher education programs, and to provide site visits and short-term intensive research internships for several teacher education candidates. 

Below a profile list of the teachers that are enrolled in our internships!

Renske Poppelaars

Renske works as a physics teacher in secondary education. She is currently doing her Masters degree in Education at the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. Together with Stefan Vandoren she is working on improving the syllabus for the first-year BSc course on black hole physics.'

Joris Coenders

As a physics teacher you are always busy with education children. But most of the time you'll discuss the theory until the 1900's. With this short internship I get the opportunity to see more of the modern age of physics. Space has always fascinated me, and i'm always trying to implement some space-related physics in my lessons, but with this experience I can tell my students a lot more about the most recent discoveries in the field of astrophysics. Together with Gijs Nelemans i'm improving the "zwaartekrachtsgolven.nl" website and adding some lessons plans for teachers and students about gravitational waves.



Michiel Cuperus

I'm a physics teacher in Gouda and I'm working on my master at the Hogeschool Utrecht. As part of my training, I'm doing an internship in Maastricht producing educational material using an alternative derivation of Einstein's special theory of relativity. This derivation does not depend on the invariance of light speed which means there is one less assumption on which the theory is built...


Daniël Kleijer

I am Daniël Kleijer from the beautiful village Rijssen, located in 'down-to-earth' Twente. Fascinated by music and physics, I divide my life as a high school physics teacher and as a musician in a cover band. This year I hope to graduate as a first degree physics teacher and in the past year I was able to do an internship at the UU, do research into gravitational waves and made a start with the influence of dynamic friction on a binary system.


Leo van der Welle

Leo is a physics teacher at a secondary school in Soest and currently studying for a Masters in physics education at the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. As a part of his education this year he will be working as an intern at KNMI (Royal Dutch Institute for Meteorology) on geological research for the future Einstein Telescope. He hopes to implement his experiences from this internship to inspire students to pursue a scientific career. In his free time Leo enjoys sports like trailrunning, mountainbiking and sailing.


Pim Burghoorn

My name is Pim Burghoorn, and this year, I will be completing my internship at DBHC, under the guidance of Tanja Hinderer, to conduct research on gravitational waves. I am currently in the final stages of completing my master’s degree in physics education. In addition to my studies, I work as a physics teacher at Gerrit Rietveld College in Utrecht.