Gerrit van Meer - Biography#

Prof. Gerrit van Meer (1953) studied biochemistry at Utrecht University and obtained his PhD on the transmembrane translocation of lipids across cell membranes in 1981 with Laurens van Deenen. During 5 years he was postdoc and staff member at EMBL Heidelberg with Kai Simons, followed by 10 and 5 years at the medical schools of Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam, respectively, and 10 years as professor of biochemistry at the Chemistry Department in Utrecht. All his career he worked on membrane lipids using novel techniques to study their intracellular organization, transport and sorting in eukaryotic cells leading to the concepts of lipid rafts and of ABC transporters as lipid translocators. Ten years ago, he joined the Lipid Maps initiative in developing a new classification system for lipids, he led the European Lipidomics initiative and was senior author with Fritz Spener on the European Science Foundation position paper Structural Medicine II: the Importance of Lipidomics for Health and Disease. Besides a number of ground breaking research papers, he wrote many authoritative reviews and opinion papers, organized many conferences and courses, and taught students at all university levels. In 2011 Gerrit was appointed dean of the Faculty of Science at Utrecht University, with 1,500 staff and 5,700 students.