Leon Oostrum successfully defends thesis -- at Westerbork

© Various

The successes of Apertif are based on a large amount of team work; and for the time domain side, Leon Oostrum was one of the main contributors to this effort. His results on Fast Radio Burst (FRB) science, and the work on ARTS that went into it, are described in his thesis Fast Radio Bursts with Apertif. On June 24, 2020, Leon defended his thesis. Under the COVID-19 rules at the time, the ceremony could not be held at the Aula, as planned. It was held online. We took the opportunity to host this festive occasion at the location on Earth most central to the thesis: Westerbork. The images above give you an impression of the defence. We were happy to have Leon's innermost family (Elly, Leo & Guinevere) there, as well as the paranymphs David and Oli and supervisor Joeri. The public talk and the opposition were streamed live, and attracted a large audience; and are now available on-demand.

The main results from Leon's thesis, interestingly, are about locations in Space. He first localised a newly discovery pulsar to not be in the binary system we were targeting. Plot twist! It turned out to be very interesting in its own right, by emitting giant pulses. That pulsar was still in our Galaxy; Leon next moved to the main part of the thesis, localising extragalactic pulses. The interferometric nature of Westerbork allows us to determine where such FRBs come from. In his chapters 4, 5 (see the paper) and 6 Leon presents our FRB discoveries and localisations. Leon defended the contents of this thesis with gusto. His answers were well grounded in facts and understanding, and allowed the audience to follow along in his reasoning. The committee were unanimous in their praise and decided to grant him the degree. At 1h04m44s into the stream, you can see Leon transmogrify into a doctor.

Congratulations Dr. Oostrum!