We speak to Femke while she is at training camp in sunny Leucate in southern France.

Can you please introduce yourself?
My name is Femke van der Veen and I am a professional windsurfer. Since two years I participate in the PWA World Tour, which is the international circuit where all world cups are held. It keeps getting better and better and what I think is unique is that I have combined this with my studies. Last month I graduated cum laude in Biomedical Engineering at TU Delft.

You managed to combine your passion for sports and movement in your thesis, can you explain how?
I find movement very interesting and especially how we can make athletes move even more efficiently, here I focused on ice skating: we have lots of skaters who are built differently but still achieve the same speeds. How can we find the ideal technique per physique so that each individual skater can achieve top performance? In my thesis, I developed a framework to optimize skating technique for different individual characteristics, speeds and skating conditions, performing more than 150 optimizations using a mathematical model.

How did you manage to combine both of these ambitions and what did you encounter?
Well, first of all a lot of good planning and looking ahead so that I could completely focus on the competitions abroad and once I was back in the Netherlands I could focus more on graduation and work. That way I was able to alternate it a bit.

Your studies are finished now but you're not done combining yet are you?
Now that my studies are finished, it's time to develop in my work at ConsultAssistent and focus more on windsurfing at the same time. What I really like and what I am very happy about is that at ConsultAssistent I have the opportunity to partly flexibly arrange my hours. That way, when I have a training session I can fully focus on that. When it is not windy and I am not on the water I can really focus on the work I do at ConsultAssistent. What is also nice is that I can do my work remotely. For example, I am now training abroad while also working for ConsultAssistent. That way, that combination does make it easy for me.

Can you explain what your work at ConsultAssistant entails and why it is so compatible?
I do two different things. The first is medical module development. That's something I actually did from time to time in my time as a student as well, where I basically try to make questionnaires as efficient and clear as possible for both the patient and the healthcare professional to make care more efficient that way. The second piece I do is to use all the data collected in those questionnaires to see if we can recognize certain patterns in them with machine learning, among other things, so that we can make predictions about, for example, the course of the disease in the patient or the prognosis. Artificial Intelligence is quite a hot topic, not only in healthcare but also outside so I find it very instructive and interesting to be involved in this.

What do you like about working at ConsultAssistant?
Besides the flexibility, I really like that I can do my work independently and that too within a fun, enthusiastic and motivated team. I also like that I'm not just focusing on my sport, but that I can learn a lot of new things outside of it.

What does the upcoming period look like for you?
Right now I have a training period in Spain and France, then at the end of April there is the first worldcup and after that there will be several more in different locations. In July and August we will be on the Canary Islands and in the fall there will be a number of worldcups on the other side of the world. There are also some fun projects planned at ConsultAssistent, so it's going to be a fun and challenging year that I'm looking forward to!

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