In addition to his academic achievements, Beek also fulfilled various administrative roles within the university, including as dean, first of the FBW and then of the FGB. In all these capacities, he knew how to give direction, connect people and move the field forward, inside and outside the walls of VU Amsterdam.
On July 9, 2026 Peter Beek will reach retirement age and on October 2 he will take his leave with a speech in the auditorium of VU Amsterdam. A fitting moment to reflect on his career, his motives and his view of the future. In this interview, he looks back on his career as a scientist and administrator, shares his insights about the field and looks ahead to what is to come.
You have built an impressive career as both a movement scientist and an administrator. Looking back, what choice or moment was decisive in the direction your career took?
Three choice moments were decisive in this. Like so many of our students, I was athletically inclined in my teens and wanted to enroll in the ALO. However, I was also good at learning and both my parents were more intellectually than physically oriented, so to speak. They preferred to see me go to college. I then started looking into the possibilities and ended up with the relatively young academic program in Physical Education at VU Amsterdam. I took that one. I liked the study and was initially captivated by the science history and philosophy courses, but gradually my interest in doing research grew.
After graduation, I was able to become a doctoral student with John Whiting, whose research interests included the control and learning of everyday movement acts, such as catching a ball. I found that such a fascinating topic that I devoted my doctoral research to it. That research was not about catching one ball but juggling multiple balls.
The third choice moment arose when Peter Hollander's term as dean expired and could not be stretched any further with no possibility. By then I had been a professor for some time and did want to make a strong administrative case for the movement sciences, fully aware that it is by no means natural to have a department of movement sciences at a university. What I did not know then was that I would hold that position for 12 years and lead a merger with another faculty, thereby perhaps weakening the position of the exercise sciences on the one hand but at the same time making it stronger because solidly embedded in a larger faculty.
Your work is characterized by a strong interdisciplinary character. Where does this fascination with connecting disciplines come from, and what has this approach given you, academically and personally?
The answer to this question lies in the subject of research. If you want to know how human movement is put together and changes through developmental and learning processes, you cannot avoid using concepts and methods from different disciplines. It is difficult to bring these together, but as far as I am concerned that is an essential characteristic of the movement sciences, otherwise it would also have no or a more limited right to exist. I have always been broadly interested in the sciences, from physiology and biomechanics to psychology and sociology, from empirical research to philosophical analysis.
This is why the exercise sciences were so attractive to me; I chose to study exercise science (then physical education) so that I would not have to choose one specific discipline. By combining different disciplinary perspectives, new insights emerge, especially when integrated into a more comprehensive representation or model. I have done my best to contribute to that, and it has brought me much, both scientifically and personally, if only that I have always maintained a broad orientation and innovation in the sciences. But yes, as my teacher, John Whiting, held up to me as a mirror: "You're a jack of all trades, but a master of none."
Your research focuses on the control and coordination of human movement, often in the context of expertise and skill development. What insights from your work have most surprised you personally?
I find this an interesting question because it calls for reflection on all that research I have done. In my research on learning to juggle, I was surprised by the enormous differences in the speed at which the participants in the study developed their juggling skills. Some could juggle three balls after only 15 minutes and others were still struggling to do so after two weeks. One of the youngest participants in my doctoral research, Michiel Hesseling, was particularly talented and would later become a well-known street and theater performer, earning a good living with his juggling skills. How and with what quality people move is highly individually determined, right up to the highest levels of performance. I observed this not only in juggling, but also in the research on drumming, running and swimming. What further stood out in this is that the unique individual way in which people move is far from constant and reproducible. Someone who makes rhythmic arm movements with a large amplitude or walks with large strides will continue to do so unless you start tinkering with the individual style of movement in a very specific way, something that is quite difficult to achieve in practice.
Movement sciences are at the intersection of basic research and practical application. When did you feel most strongly that your science "mattered" outside the academy?
Two experiences stand out in this regard. With Melvyn Roerdink, I am credited with inventing the C-Mill, a conveyor belt that allows you as a therapist or caregiver to use auditory and visual cues to influence a patient's gait pattern in a desired direction. We ceded the patent for this device to the company Force Link, which would later merge into Motek Medical. In retrospect, perhaps unwise, because more than 100 copies of the C-Mill were sold, but with the compensating financial support of Force Link, we were able to conduct a number of foundational studies on the C-Mill and its application in rehabilitation practice, where it is now widely used. Later in my career, I started to focus on unlocking and translating the findings and insights from the motor learning research for sports and physical therapy and rehabilitation practice, including through a cycle of five mini-lectures for the University of the Netherlands, articles in FysioPraxis and Sportgericht and podcasts. There appeared to be a lot of need and interest for these, much more than for my most successful scientific publications (judging by citations, viewers and downloads, the difference in impact appeared to be in the order of a factor 100).
You held several administrative roles in addition to your scientific work, including as dean.
What do you take from your scientific background into your way of governing and vice versa?
Reality, like human movement, is multidimensional in nature. There are several sides to every administrative problem. It is important to map them well in order to arrive at an administrative course or decision. This requires that all dimensions, visions and scenarios are as well-founded as possible. Against that background, as an administrator I have always been a connector, leaving room for all voices, regardless of rank or position. I was averse to power games, false openness and arguments of authority and countered them with a constant search for the true conversation and honest, valid arguments, which was not always easy, especially in times of administrative crisis. Thereby, during my time as co-director of the VU, it was necessary more often than I had expected to recall why the primary processes of teaching and research are so named. Fortunately, I was able to prevent the reorganization of business operations from centralizing the technical services, which was, of course, an unfortunate and disastrous plan.
You supervised many doctoral students and young researchers.
What did you mainly try to give them, apart from content knowledge?
What I mainly tried to impart to my PhD students is the ability to communicate strongly and self-confidently, both in the spoken and written word, radiating openness and self-confidence. Young researchers need to make themselves heard and bring their findings and ideas to the limelight, making them visible to the scientific community and beyond. This also builds confidence in themselves and their work. In addition, I try to think with them about where they are in their career, what they want and what makes them happy and enthusiastic, and what could be an appropriate next step in their professional career.
The academic world has changed a lot in recent decades.
Which developments worry you, and which ones make you hopeful?
Exercise science at VU Amsterdam has been strongly fundamentally oriented since the advent of conditional funding in the 1980s, with a strong focus on biomechanics, muscular and exercise physiology and, at a later stage, behavioral sciences. Applications, such as the clap skate, resulted from fundamental knowledge. Nowadays, much more attention has been paid to the social value of research, often referred to as "impact. Rightly so in itself because much of the research is funded directly (first flow of funds) or indirectly (NWO) by the government and the population of the Netherlands wants to know what society gains from the research.
For exercise science, this is not difficult to demonstrate. After all, it is hard to imagine working on a movement science problem as a researcher without having application possibilities. What we still have to learn as a department is to organize more strongly on that and place our fundamental interests in the context of research aimed at achieving societal impact or the conditions for it. The dark side of the strong emphasis placed on societal impact in this era, the opportunities for doing fundamental research, apart from person-centered grants, are becoming increasingly difficult and that's a shame, because scientific impact is also a form of impact that, moreover, often precedes societal innovations. So we should not throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater.
With the developments in data science and AI, the exercise sciences, like all sciences, are entering a new era in which the classic experiment followed by statistical analysis based on a relatively small set of data will give way to new forms of research based on intensive static analysis based on a large amount of data. I also hope and expect that this will provide more insight into the unique individual signature of the steering of movement and change therein through development and learning processes. An interesting development in that regard are the "digital twins," or digital replicas of individuals that via sensors and continuous data streams and AI mimic and predict how individuals respond to input, for example in the form of sensory information, cognitive tasks or training stimuli. As far as I am concerned, a very exciting development that I will certainly follow from the sidelines!
