Simon van Lierde

PhD researcher and research software engineer at CML, Leiden University. I build open, reproducible research infrastructure for industrial ecology and the circular economy.

Focus areas: industrial ecology, circular economy, and life-cycle assessment.
Main stack: Python, FastAPI, TypeScript/React, PostgreSQL, and Docker.

Selected work

Reverse Engineering Lab (RELab)

Research infrastructure I designed and built: a FastAPI backend, a PostgreSQL data model for life-cycle assessment, and an Expo / React Native frontend. RELab collects disassembly data on durable goods to close a long-standing product-data gap in industrial ecology.

In active use at CML: 78 products, 1,331 components, and 3,610 images catalogued so far, including two teardown workshops with 135 participants.

Disassembly over time

Activity in RELab by month. Switch measures and hover a column for the exact figure. The numbers shown are sample data pending a live connection to the RELab API.

02468Jul 2025Sep 2025Nov 2025Jan 2026Mar 2026May 2026

monitoring

Centralised observability for CML's research platforms: one host runs Grafana, Loki, Tempo, Prometheus, and an OpenTelemetry Collector, cross-referencing logs, traces, and metrics. Runs on Docker Compose and OpenTofu.

Source

  • OpenTelemetry
  • Grafana stack
  • Docker Compose
  • OpenTofu

msc-thesis-ie

My MSc Industrial Ecology thesis (Leiden / TU Delft): a bottom-up model of building cooling demand in The Hague and its life-cycle impacts, from BAG geodata, an hourly heat-balance model, and an LCA layer. An interactive dashboard maps cooling demand across the city's 112 neighbourhoods, replays a typical year day by day, and breaks down the life-cycle GHG footprint.

SourceLive demoThesis manuscriptZenodo dataset

  • Python
  • LCA
  • Geospatial
  • TypeScript

cv-ie-taxonomy

Interactive exploded-teardown map of a computer-vision taxonomy for industrial ecology, built as a companion visual for an upcoming publication. A custom React/SVG scene with scroll-driven exploration and Motion animations.

SourceLive demo

  • React
  • TypeScript
  • SVG
  • Motion

credit-heatmap

Build CRediT author-contribution statements on the edge: drag roles into a matrix and export to JATS4R XML, CSV, JSON, or Markdown for journal submission.

SourceLive demo

  • TypeScript
  • Next.js 15
  • Tailwind CSS
  • Zustand

check-json5

A drop-in replacement for the standard check-json pre-commit hook that also accepts JSON5 (comments, trailing commas), without giving up the C parser's speed on ordinary JSON; ~500× faster than json5 alone on large files.

Source

  • Python
  • pre-commit
  • uv

Currently prototyping an AI4IE resource hub and a project gallery for CML.
I also send fixes upstream to tools I build on, mostly in the FastAPI and open-LCA ecosystems, such as fastapi-mail and sentier_data_tools.

Personal projects (4)