Jan van Hest - Biography#

Jan van Hest obtained his PhD from Eindhoven University of Technology in 1996 in Macro-Organic chemistry with prof E.W. Meijer. He worked as a postdoc with prof D.A. Tirrell (provost of Caltech) on protein engineering in Amherst. In 1997 he joined the chemical company DSM in the Netherlands. In 2000 - 4 years after his PhD - he was appointed full professor in Bio-organic chemistry at Radboud University Nijmegen. As of September 2016 he holds the chair of Bio-organic Chemistry at Eindhoven University of Technology. Since May 2017 he is the scientific director of the Institute for Complex Molecular Systems (ICMS). The group’s focus is to develop well-defined compartments for nanomedicine and artificial cell research. Using a combination of techniques from polymer science to protein engineering, well-defined carriers and scaffolds are developed for application in e.g. cancer treatment, immunology and ophthalmology.

Van Hest was elected member of The Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005. He has won a VICI grant (2010), the highest personal career grant obtainable through open competition in the Netherlands. He is one of the main grantees of two 10-year gravitation programs on Functional Molecular Systems (2012) and Interactive Polymer Materials (Eindhoven, 2022). In 2016 he was awarded an ERC Advanced grant. Van Hest is associate editor of Bioconjugate Chemistry. He has been elected member of the Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019, and was awarded the Spinoza premium in 2020, the highest scientific distinction in the Netherlands. Since 2020, he is board member of the Royal Academy Van 't Hoff Foundation.