With the appointment of Erik Meijer (1963), TU Delft is getting a renowned programmer. Meijer is the founder of LINQ (.NET Language Integrated Query), which allows different programming languages to retrieve data from databases. He is the inventor of more than 68 awarded patents. His first lecture on “Channel 9”, a video channel dedicated to software development, has been viewed more than a million times.
Erik Meijer is the head of the Cloud Programmability Team at Microsoft. On 7 November, he will be speaking for the first time as a professor in the Netherlands at TEDxDelft.
Cloud
More and more companies and organisations are turning to the cloud. This is a method of working that makes it possible to use business software, documents, and servers, anytime and anywhere. According to Professor Arie van Deursen of TU Delft, “Well-known examples of cloud computing include Office 365 and Windows Azure, where the user does not know where his files are physically stored, but he can still access them from any computer that has Internet access. Cloud computing offers economies of scale, and is characterized by new business models such as pay-per-use”.
Future
Van Deursen: “Instead of installing their own hardware, organizations are now making use of large data centres that are run by the cloud-computing vendors. It is generally expected that the field of cloud computing will play an increasingly important role, and more and more IT services will be made available via cloud computing”. Erik Meijer is considered one of the best developers in the field of programming languages.
LINQ
Meyer's work at Microsoft is innovative, and simplifies the connection between theory and actual programming. Many of his research results are directly used in various Microsoft products. For example, Meijer is the founder of LINQ (.NET Language Integrated Query), which allows different programming languages to retrieve data from databases. According to Maarten-Jan Vermeulen, Academic Lead at Microsoft, “At Microsoft, we want to offer people the opportunity to access their digital information wherever and whenever they want. The cloud plays an essential role in this process. We are proud of the fact that Erik, as one of our people, is now able to share his vision at TU Delft with the software developers of the future”.
Erik Meijer
Erik Meijer graduated in 1992 from the University of Nijmegen. In the 1990s, he was a lecturer in software technology at Utrecht University, after which he swapped his academic position for the job of software developer at Microsoft. Meijer has been closely involved in developing various programs and products for Microsoft. He remains a Microsoft employee, and will be devoting one-fifth of his time to his research at TU Delft.
Receive the Funding Newswire each Tuesday, our Policy Bulletin each Thursday, and news about bridging Europe’s east-west innovation gap twice a month in The Widening. 
A unique international forum for public research organisations and companies to connect their external engagement with strategic interests around their R&D system.
