PhD researcher and research software engineer at the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML), Leiden University. I build open, reproducible research infrastructure for industrial ecology and the circular economy. Most of my work turns messy product-level data into FAIR datasets and tools researchers can use directly.
Focus areas: industrial ecology, circular economy, and life-cycle assessment. Main stack: Python, FastAPI, TypeScript/React, PostgreSQL, and Docker.
RELab collects disassembly data on durable goods to close a long-standing product-data gap in industrial ecology. I designed and built the platform end to end: a FastAPI backend, a PostgreSQL data model built for LCA, and an Expo/React Native frontend. In active use as lab infrastructure at CML: 50+ products disassembled, 1,250+ components and 3,000+ photos catalogued, with Repair Café pilots planned.
- 🌐 Live platform: app.cml-relab.org
- 📖 Documentation: docs.cml-relab.org
- 🧩 RPI camera plugin: relab-rpi-cam-plugin, a FastAPI service for remote image capture during disassembly
credit-heatmap is a full-stack web tool for building CRediT author-contribution statements, with an interactive role matrix and JATS4R XML / JSON export for journal submission. Built on Next.js 15 with a framework-agnostic TypeScript core that runs the domain logic in the browser, deployable both as a Docker container and on Cloudflare Workers (OpenNext). Live demo at credit.duinlab.nl
msc-thesis-ie is my MSc Industrial Ecology thesis (Leiden / TU Delft): a bottom-up model of building cooling demand in The Hague and its life-cycle environmental impacts, built from BAG geospatial data, an hourly heat-balance model, and an LCA layer. It is published in the TU Delft repository, with the dataset archived on Zenodo.
monitoring is the observability stack for CML's research platforms: an OpenTelemetry pipeline (Grafana, Loki, Tempo, Prometheus) collecting logs, traces, and metrics from RELab and other services, with CI-validated configs and a one-command demo.
I maintain reusable tooling I need in my own work, like check-json5, a pre-commit hook whose fast-path parser makes it roughly 500× faster on large JSON files, and I send small fixes upstream to tools I use, mostly in the FastAPI and open-LCA ecosystems, such as fastapi-mail and sentier_data_tools.
Outside work I build small web apps I keep tinkering with:
- 6-second-scribbles, a fast drawing game
- scattergories, a browser word game
- tide, a period tracker
- bikespot, a bike-parking tracker
- 🌐 Website: simonvanlierde.github.io
- 🆔 ORCID: 0009-0006-6953-909X
- 💼 LinkedIn: in/simon-van-lierde
- 🎓 Leiden profile: universiteitleiden.nl



