Citing Israel’s Technion, Delft University of Technology’s doctoral candidate quits aerospace engineering programme
by Piyush Mathur
Against the backdrop of the ongoing Israeli genocide in Palestine, Jasper Groen—an aerospace-engineering doctoral researcher at the Netherland’s Delft University of Technology (TU Delft)—announced his resignation yesterday (December 11, 2025) from the programme citing Israeli connecting to his project.
The announcement was made on LinkedIn, the US-based social media platform popular particularly among those with college degrees and white collar professions.
Noting that Israel’s Technion—an important contributor to Israel’s military establishment—was leading his TU Delft doctoral project via ‘a European Innovation Council consortium’, Groen claims that he was no longer able to reconcile morally with his erstwhile project.
‘I could not, with a good conscience, continue working on my project as long as TU Delft and I were in collaboration with this partner’, he wrote in his LinkedIn post. The post also implicitly complains about Groen’s superiors’ lack of moral clarity on this issue, leading to his decision to quit the programme.
Groen has also appealed to the LinkedIn community to help him out with any work-related ‘opportunities in Brussels and the surrounding cities.’
Jasper Groen's LinkedIn post of December 11, 2025, announcing his resignation from TU Delft's aerospace engineering doctoral programme.
(Credit: Jasper Groen)
Dissent from TU Delft’s stance on collaborative projects with Israeli entities had been brewing
Notably, Groen had coauthored a critique of TU Delft’s May 23, 2025 publication, The Moral Deliberation Advice Report: Sensitive collaboration relating to Israel-Gaza.
Titled ‘TU Delft, Integrity, and Genocide’, the critique, published in June 2025, argued that TU Delft’s report was pushing ‘process’ and ‘dialogue’, instead of immediate action, regarding what to do with the projects that had Israel’s direct involvement—even as the genocide in Palestine had already been declared by reputable institutions, and was easy to witness.
The critique also dissented from TU Delft’s decision to suspend future collaborations with Israel without terminating existing ones, such as the type of project that had employed Groen until his resignation.
That critique—which also offers constructive ways to TU Delft to choose an alternative, righteous path to its recently announced stance—can be accessed via this link (and endorsed online):
https://tudelft.forintegrity.nl/output/2025-our-moral-deliberation.html
Last words
There is a poignant, bitter irony to all this, in that Groen had made a very upbeat post on LinkedIn a year ago when he was admitted into the programme that he has now quit.
In 2024, the day he started out in this programme, he declared the following to his LinkedIn network: ‘The next four years I will work on developing bio-inspired encapsulation strategies for—as well as practical (and maybe just cool) applications of—DNA as a data carrier.’
Jasper Groen's LinkedIn post dated to AD 2024; this is when he excitedly joined TU Delft's aerospace engineering doctoral programme. (Credit: Jasper Groen)
It is pertinent to note that collaboration with Technion has also been cited as the reason by three people who turned down the University of Galloway’s honorary doctorates. Doctoral funding for six seats was also postponed, citing Technion, by the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in July.
More generally from the Dutch quarters, there have been reports that Erasmus University Rotterdam and Radboud University have cut ties with some Israeli institutions; many other institutions from around the world have also been cutting ties with Israeli institutions.