Successfully defended my PhD thesis

On January 26th, I successfully defended my PhD thesis entitled “Landscape quality assessments using deep learning” at Wageningen University & Research. This brings my PhD journey to a close, and what an amazing ending to four fantastic years it has been! My thesis was awarded the predicate cum laude, which is an amazing and humbling honour to receive for my work. My heartfelt thanks go out to Devis Tuia and Diego Marcos for being my advisors and friends throughout the research period. Your guidance has been invaluable to me. Thank you also to all of my Wageningen colleagues and everyone that has collaborated with me in the past few years. It’s been a wonderful and memorable experience.

In my research, I worked on assessing landscape qualities (such as landscape beauty and urban liveability) from images by using deep learning models, and on improving the interpretability of models for this task. Beyond that, I also worked on vision-and-language models to provide new assessment methods through imagined mind’s eye scenes by using text descriptions (forthcoming publication, watch this space!). As for next steps, I’m happy to continue on in academia at the IVM Institute for Environmental Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam as a postdoctoral researcher. And after the summer? We’ll see!