The group

The so-called Vriend-group is a fluid entity. I like every group member to become a strong, high quality, independent scientist. And in most cases I have been successful, so far. In principle, people in my group work on one of four topics:

But occasionally, people enter my group who want to work on a different topic. If they come with a question worth answering (and I understand the topic well enough to be of any use as a supervisor), they can work on that topic too.

Most people work alone, or in small collaborations. The more senior people work totally independent, even without my involvement if time is ripe for that.

We collaborate with many people from all over the world. Often, these collaborations become so intense that we consider our collaborators as group members.

I have listed the present group members in the introduction. This page continues with ex-staff, close friends in science, etc.

Chris Spronk

Chris Spronk is working on protocols to improve the quality of structures solved by NMR. He is using a host of techniques to do so. Some of the research topics are "Prediction of structure ensembles that are commensurate with the data" and "Improving the MD protocols used to refine NMR ensembles".

Rob Hooft worked with me in the mid 90's on structure validation. He is the father of WHAT_CHECK, the de facto structure validation software for the whole world.

Elmar Krieger is the author of Yasara. He worked with me as a PhD student in the period 2000-2004. Elmar is today still maintaining a series of the WHAT IF associated databases and programs. For example, he updated DSSP to 21-st century standards, he maintains the PDBFINDER, and the DSSP and HSSP databases. Look under the TwinSet to see why I, the author of WHAT IF, like Yasara so much.

Daan van Aalten worked with me as an undergrad student in the early 90's. Later I was partly involved in the supervision of his PhD project. While in my group Daan worked on ProDrug (in those days still called DavaBug :-), and he kept working on it ever since. ProDrug interprets the small molecules for WHAT IF.
Commercial users will have to request a license for PRODRUG. As with other software, like DSSP or GRID, WHAT IF will work fine without this associated software, but it will work better with it.

Bert de Groot is the author of CONCOORD. Concoord comes with WHAT IF. This software is available in a stand-alone version too.

Olivier (Ollie) Lange wrote the Olga interface to GROMACS while being a PhD student in the group of Helmut Grubmüller at the MPI in Göttingen. Obviously, I thank Helmut for allowing Ollie to do this.

Jürgen Haas is nowadays taking over the Olga maintenance from Ollie. Jürgen uses Olga a lot, and he can help you with this interface.

Jens Nielsen worked with me as a PhD student in the period 1997-2000. He improved the way electrostatic calculations are being performed. Today, Jens is still 'responsible' for the electrostatic and pKa aspects of WHAT IF.

Rolando Rodriguez is the genius behind the OpenGL graphics in WHAT IF (and a few other things). He works at the CIGB Although this institute is listed at their 50 pesos bill: they are not allowed to print their own money. The OpenGL part is also freely available to all our friends in the USA :-)