Role: Camera EGSE development, PLATOSIM software development

Dr. Rik Huygen(Msc Chemistry, 1986; PhD in Chemistry, 1993) is Research Manager at the Institute of Astronomy at KU Leuven. He has worked on international ESA projects since 1993, as software engineer for the Short Wavelength Spectrometer (SWS) in the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO) and later as ground segment system engineer and data processing software system architect for the Herschel/PACS instrument.He is the developer of the binstruct package used for decoding and processing of satellite telemetry for Herschel, for JWST/MIRI during instrument and system tests, and the PACS Calibration Framework. He is currently involved in ground segment design and definition of the instrument control center (ICC) for SPICA/SAFARI and supervising the design and development of the E2E Simulator for the PLATO mission. He is responsible for the PLATO Camera Common EGSE that will be used for optical alignment and focus optimisation of the PLATO Cameras at CSL (Belgium), and for the thermal vacuum camera tests in test houses at INTA, IAS, and SRON. He has (co-)authored over 50 papers with over 2000 citations. Publication list includes papers in astrophysics, on (space) instrumentation, measurement techniques, data analysis, software engineering.