Amito Haarhuis is the Director of Rijksmuseum Boerhaave in Leiden, The Netherlands. He is also a columnist for the science pages of the Dutch national newspaper De Telegraaf. He is a member of the Ecsite Board of Trustees since 2019. Before that, he was an expert member of the Annual Conference Programme Committee (ACPC) of Ecsite for six years.

Listening to - Los Aurora, a new young flamenco band from Catalonia. They mix flamenco with jazz. I heard them at the Flamenco Biennale in Amsterdam. It rekindled my love for flamenco that I had not listened to for a while.

Reading - the project website of the international research project ‘Visualizing the Unknown’ that Rijksmuseum Boerhaave participates in. This project explores the visual culture of seventeenth century microscopists like Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. How do you represent something that nobody has seen before? And how to communicate your observations? It is the start of science communication.

Following - Professor Jillian Banfield from the University of California, the first woman to receive the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek medal after fourteen men. Like him she revolutionized microbiology with new instruments. She is the founder of ‘metagenomics’: the genetic analysis of a mixture of microorganisms.

Things keeping me up at night - trying to see the Northern Lights on the rare nights that they are visible in the Netherlands.

Somewhere I’ve been recently - the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, USA. I was wowed by the Glass Flowers Gallery with the amazing glass models of plants made by father and son Blaschka, Czech glass artists, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.

Somewhere I’m planning to go - I am really looking forward to the Ecsite Conference in Malta. I am especially excited about a new pre conference workshop for CEOs that we created with some board members. An opportunity for CEOs to connect and discuss about themes that keep them up at night. It is right before the Speakers’ reception.