‘From my father I learned which are essential ingredients to achieve high quality,’ says Nick de Keijzer in magazine De Ingenieur, which portrayed him as a top talent.
Nick’s grandfather designed ships and his father worked as a toolmaker. Nick himself attended the Leiden Instrumentmakers School and the higher vocational course in electrical engineering at Avans University of Applied Sciences. He now makes complex fine-tuned instruments for space at SRON. Such as a calibration mechanism for an infrared telescope with cryogenic superconducting detectors. At those cryogenic temperatures, the challenge is to find a balance between structural strength and thermal insulation.
‘By doing a lot myself, I developed my mechanical intuition – the instinctive feel for technique and material, shaped by years of practising, learning and creating,’ says Nick.
‘We continue to develop the technologies for upcoming ESA or NASA balloon and space missions. I love the fact that what I create actually goes into space. Who can say that?’
This is a summary of the article with Nick in the Dossier Talents of professional magazine ‘De Ingenieur’.
