About Me

Hi 👋 I’m Maarten!

Over the last few years I have taken, what felt as, a rather unorthodox path towards becoming a Data Scientist. I started out as a Psychologist with master degrees in organizational- and clinical psychology. Although interesting fields on their own, the statistical nature of the fields grabbed me the most. I sought out to combine psychology and statistics with a master degree in Data Science, which eventually led me to being the Data Scientist I am now.

Things to Note

• co-author of the upcoming Hands-On Large Language Models book
• creator of popular open-source packages, like BERTopic, PolyFuzz, and KeyBERT
• written articles on Medium that collectively have be read more than 1,000,000 times
• created the 9 distance measures visualization that often goes viral ^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8}
• frequently give talks about subjects ranging from AI to Psychology
• graduated with three MSc degrees cum laude
• written academic articles about my open-source work, combined 700+ citations
• published my thesis at ECML-PKDD 2019
• love playing board games (currently Splendor Duel)

Experience

Currently, I work as a Clinical Data Scientist at IKNL in R&D with a focus on NLP and LLM-based (federated) algorithmic solutions in the field of cancer research and palliative care. Aside from my daily work, I write articles on medium and continue the development of open-source packages.

Timeline
2021-now: NLP Engineer @ IKNL
2018-now: A.I. Author @ Medium
2019-now: Freelance Data Scientist / Coach
2019-2021: Machine Learning Engineer @ Van Spaendonck
2018-2019: Intern Data Scientist @ Interpolis
2017-2017: Intern Data Scientist @ TomTom
2015-2016: Trainee Clinical Psychologist @ PsyQ
2014-2014: Data Analist @ IEP
2012-2017: Teacher Social Studies @ LOI

Contact

Feel free to ask me anything!

To contact me, you can connect with me on LinkedIn and sent me a message there or email me at maartengrootendorst [at] gmail [dot] com