Chris Kleijn receives J.B. Westerdijk award

At the Faculty of Applied Sciences’ New Year breakfast, Dean Lucas van Vliet presented the J.B. Westerdijk award to Prof. Chris Kleijn. The Westerdijk award is the faculty’s most prestigious education prize.

Chris Kleijn was nominated for the award by the VVTP, the Applied Physics study association. In her nomination, Education Officer Eva Spreeuw expressed particular praise for his contributions to the faculty’s education as professor of Physical Transport Phenomena. She writes: “The popularity of the Bachelor's degree programme has increased enormously under Chris’s leadership. With more than 300 first-year students every year, representing around 25% of the market share in the Netherlands, he and his team ensure everything runs smoothly.”

Best practice
in her letter to Prof. Jack Pronk, Chairman of the Board of the J.B. Westerdijk Fund Foundation, Spreeuw describes several initiatives that Chris Kleijn has successfully implemented in order to improve education within the Applied Sciences degree programmes: “He devised, introduced and implemented the method used for assessing Bachelor’s and Master’s final projects … This assessment method is now used across the whole of TU Delft and was labelled ‘best practice’ by the committee responsible for assessing all Dutch degree programmes in chemistry.”

In the letter, she also highlights the new Design Engineering for Physicists course, for which Kleijn is also partly responsible. “This course sets our Bachelor's degree programme apart from all other Applied Physics programmes in the Netherlands. The new course teaches students to apply new and contemporary technologies in a physics context, such as designing experiments and physics apparatus. This so-called design teaching, based on the Maker Education philosophy, aims to prepare students for today’s high-tech professional practice.”

“We believe that all of these things combined make Chris Kleijn a very suitable candidate for the Westerdijk award”, Spreeuw concludes. “In our view, Chris deserves recognition from the faculty for all his great achievements and hard work.”

About the Westerdijk award
The J.B. Westerdijk award is presented to a person who has shown exceptional dedication to the education provided in Applied Physics. The award was named after Mr Westerdijk, a much-loved former professor. He taught physics in various faculties within TU Delft and did so with such dedication that even students who had not chosen it as their main programme highly appreciated the subject.

When he left in 1980, Professor Westerdijk refused to accept any farewell gifts. He eventually conceded that people wishing to make a gift could do so by transferring money into the account of a new foundation that would bear his name and from which a prize would regularly be awarded to a lecturer or staff member at TU Delft who has made a special contribution to education. The J.B. Westerdijk Fund Foundation was established in 1982.