I stay in Potchefstroom, South Africa, it is about 90 min drive South-West of Johannesburg. I'm an associate professor in Computer Science and Information Systems. I have a passion for teaching and my formal training is in Computer Science. I teach advanced programming techniques in Java and advanced database systems using Hadoop. Currently, I supervise 9 PhD students in different Computer Science, Information Systems and Education topics. I'm a scholar in research methodology with a specific interest in action research from a critical social theory perspective.
Working as programmer, I soon realized that people do not know what they want, or that is how I perceived it from my functionalist training. Later I learned that multiple perspectives enriches one's understanding and that a model is only one version of the proposed system. I was introduced to systems thinking by the book: "Computers in Context" By Dahlbom and Mathiassen and immediately understood how my thinking was post-functionalistic. I worked for 10 years in a group of systems thinkers in the Netherlands and then I was granted the opportunity to attend the very last edition of the Lugano Summer school presented by Peter Checkland and Werner Ulrich in 2012. Ulrich's message of "Giving a voice to the affected" was something I could relate to being from South Africa - a country known for "not listening to the affected". I also learned that in the corporate world there are involved and affected parties and I'm striving to find technical computer science solutions to design problems that are inherently flexible enough to support different perspectives. I met Gerald Midgley in the group of systems thinkers in the Netherlands and he invited me to ISSS in 2014 in Washington when he was President of the ISSS.
As VP for publications and Research my intention is to promote the academic nature of the ISSS. I value the inter-disciplinary character and especially the interaction with practitioners. My own thinking is influenced and developed by scholars from behavioral sciences and through interdisciplinary research we are able to show that multidisciplinary research guided by systemic thinking can lead to improved solutions to local problems.