Dr. Kees Verbaan

Passive Damping, Precision Engineering & Motion Stage Dynamics | NTS Group & Eindhoven University of Technology | Trainer at High Tech Institute

Kees Verbaan is a Dutch precision engineering specialist whose work sits at the intersection of mechanical design, control systems theory and high-tech industry. He works as system architect at NTS Group in Eindhoven, where he contributes to complex precision system development in the Stages & Handlers domain, and is affiliated with Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) as Hybrid Teacher in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Kees Verbaan is a system architect and a specialist in passive damping, precision mechatronics and motion stage dynamics — a field that sits at the heart of semiconductor equipment, medical imaging and high-precision instrumentation. His work addresses one of the central engineering challenges in high-tech systems: controlling mechanical resonance without sacrificing bandwidth or positioning accuracy. As machines push toward higher throughput and tighter tolerances, the ability to design damping into a system from first principles — rather than compensating for it in software — becomes a critical differentiator. Verbaan brings together mechanical engineering, control systems theory and materials science into a coherent design methodology that he applies both in industry and in the classroom.

Verbaan holds a B.Eng. in Mechanical Engineering from University of Applied Sciences Utrecht (2007) and an MSc in Mechanical Engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE) (2010). His MSc design project was carried out for ASML Research Mechatronics, under the supervision of professors Maarten Steinbuch and Nick Rosielle — an early collaboration with one of the world’s leading semiconductor equipment manufacturers that directly shaped his subsequent research agenda.

He went on to complete a PhD at TU/e (awarded 20 April 2015), again in close collaboration with ASML Research Mechatronics, within the Control Systems Technology group. His dissertation, Robust Mass Damper Design for Bandwidth Increase of Motion Stages, developed systematic methods for designing tuned and robust mass dampers for planar positioning stages of the kind used in wafer scanners and other high-precision equipment. His academic profile, including supervised theses, is publicly accessible via the TU/e research portal.

Since completing his doctorate, Verbaan has held the role of system architect at NTS Group, where he contributes to complex precision system development in the Stages & Handlers domain. From 2023, he is additionally affiliated with TU/e as Hybrid Teacher within the Department of Mechanical Engineering, supervising bachelor, master and EngD students and contributing to courses on design principles and mechanical design. He served on the advisory board and program committee of the DSPE Conference 2025.

In 2021, he received the Ir. A. Davidson Award from the Dutch Society for Precision Engineering (DSPE), awarded for multidisciplinary contributions to NTS projects and sustained commitment to knowledge transfer.

In 2022, High Tech Institute named him Teacher of the Year together with Hans Vermeulen, based on participant evaluations of the Passive Damping-training.

Verbaan’s peer-reviewed work appears in Mechatronics, Journal of Sound and Vibration and Rheologica Acta. Key publications include Broadband damping of non-rigid-body resonances of planar positioning stages by tuned mass dampers (Mechatronics, 2014, doi:10.1016/j.mechatronics.2013.12.013), Broadband damping of high-precision motion stages (Mechatronics, 2017, doi:10.1016/j.mechatronics.2016.10.014) and The advantage of linear viscoelastic material behavior in passive damper design (Journal of Sound and Vibration, 2017, doi:10.1016/j.jsv.2016.05.031). He also presented at IEEE CCA 2013 (doi:10.1109/CCA.2013.6662898) and the ASPE Annual Meeting 2017.

At High Tech Institute, Verbaan teaches:

Passive Damping for High Tech Systems

Design Principles for Precision Engineering

These courses are aimed at engineers working in semiconductor equipment, medical devices and precision instrumentation. Both courses translate research-level insight into industrial design practice: participants work with real system configurations and learn to apply damping and design principles as first-principles tools, not afterthoughts.

Kees Verbaan is system architect at NTS Group (Eindhoven), Hybrid Teacher at Eindhoven University of Technology within the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and trainer at High Tech Institute in Design for Precision Engineering and Passive Damping for High Tech Systems.

Passive damping: increasingly part of a high tech engineers standard toolset