Gerben Stavenga

Gerben Stavenga is a Software Engineer and researcher with a background in theoretical physics, high-performance computing, and large-scale software systems. He is currently a Software Engineer at Zeromatter, where he works on advanced computational infrastructure.

Gerben has held software engineering positions across leading technology and blockchain companies. At AptosLabs, he contributed to the development of scalable blockchain protocols. At Futureswap, he focused on Ethereum blockchain development and the design, modeling, and simulation of financial futures markets, applying expertise in Solidity, cryptography, and quantitative finance. Earlier, he spent over seven years as a Software Engineer at Google, where he optimized large-scale content advertising infrastructure, server stacks, and network communication systems.

Before transitioning fully into industry, Gerben pursued a career in academic research in theoretical and mathematical physics. He was a Postdoctoral Researcher at UCLA, where he developed software for higher-order loop corrections in particle collision simulations, and at Fermilab, where he helped pioneer one of the first GPU-powered particle collision simulators for high-energy physics. His early work also included software development in information retrieval at OGD ict-diensten, where he built indexing systems for large text corpora.

Gerben’s expertise spans blockchain protocols, distributed systems, cryptography, financial simulation, and large-scale optimization, as well as high-performance computing, quantum field theory, and computational physics. His career bridges academia and industry, with contributions ranging from fundamental particle physics research to modern distributed systems and blockchain innovation.

He holds a Ph.D. in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics (2009) and a Master’s degree in Physics from Utrecht University.