Bart was appointed at what was then the Rijksuniversiteit Limburg (University of Limburg) on 1 July 1981. A quick count means that he has been working at UM for 42 years—hats off to that! In chronological order, Bart has held the following positions:

• text processing specialist/system programmer;
• data communication specialist;
• product group coordinator;
• security officer;
• data protection officer;
• and, most recently, corporate information security officer and initiator of the UM Security Operations Centre.

In all these positions, Bart has exerted himself to the full for the benefit of UM and, later, also nationally by chairing SURF SCIPR (the SURF Community for Information Security and Privacy). With his historical knowledge of UM and his substantive knowledge of the information domain, Bart has always been approachable to all to answer questions and offer advice. He is rightly seen as an authority in his field.

Bart’s expertise as well as his personality—integral, calm and helpful—were very useful when UM fell victim to a cyberhack. As a substantive expert, Bart was added to the crisis team. He succeeded in keeping a sense of calm while simultaneously working hard to solve the problem. He then made a virtue of necessity by using the crisis to raise and maintain broad awareness of cybersecurity. It can be rightly said that thanks to Bart, the entire education and research field in Maastricht and in the Netherlands as a whole has become somewhat safer. We would like to thank you heartily for this.