Role: PLATOSIM software development; performance team support

Dr. Joris De Ridder (Msc Mathematics, 1996; PhD in Astrophysics, 2001) is Research Manager at the Institute of Astronomy at KU Leuven. He is an expert in solar-like oscillations in red giants and B-stars and astro-statistical data mining with an emphasis on mining large synoptic photometric space-based surveys. He has been team leader of several international space-based astronomical missions, including currently the Variability Classification Working Group in the DPAC consortium for the ESA Gaia space mission, in the consortium of the ESA mission PLATO as PLATOSIM software developer and part of the Payload Performance Team, and previously the NASA Kepler Space Mission ‘Red Giants Working Group’ and CoRoT space mission ‘Red Giants Team’ team leader. He has (co)-authored over 105 papers with over 7200 citations.