Koen Kuijken is a Professor at the Leiden Observatory since 2002, carrying out research on galaxies and cosmology, particularly regarding the distribution of dark matter. From 2007 until 2012 he was the Scientific Director at the Leiden Observatory, before stepping down to return to full-time research and teaching.

More information about Koen Kuijken

The interests of Koen Kuijken center mainly on the dynamics of galaxies, gravitational lensing and dark matter. His research makes use of observations taken with the telescopes on La Palma, Hawaii and Chile and the Hubble Space Telescope.

As part of Kuijken’s research, he is involved in two instrument-based projects: the OmegaCAM  wide-field camera, and the Planetary Nebulae Spectrograph. OmegaCAM became operational in September 2011 on the VLT Survey Telescope in Chile. It is an optical CCD mosaic camera that can image a square degree with 0.2 arcsec pixels, and that delivers exquisite image quality over the full field. With it, the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS) started, which will map 1500 square degrees of extragalactic sky in multiple colours, with the aim to study the distribution of dark matter and the nature of dark energy, principally through the technique of gravitational lensing.

STRW page

Personal homepage

Publications