Ralf, a native of The Netherlands, finished his MSc degree in Applied Physics in 2004 at Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands. He then moved to London to start a PhD in Physics, during which he studied the ratchet effect with cold atoms in an optical lattice. In 2007 he came to MIT to start his postdoc in BEC2, where he is now working on creating an anti-ferromagnetic state of repulsive interacting fermions in an optical lattice.