Robert Griffioen has a background in Artificial Intelligence. He did a Ph.D. about brain modelling with neural networks and a postdoc about large scale agent based simulations in an European project. After that he worked as a Business Intelligent consultant for a few years. Then he worked at Statistic Netherlands (Centraal Bureau for the Statistiek) in IT and Research for almost 10 years. Finally, he landed at SURF as among others a project manager, product manager and cloud solution architect for scientific projects.