John van der Oost - Biography#

John van der Oost (1958) obtained his PhD at the Free University (Amsterdam 1989). After postdoc positions at Helsinki University (Finnish Academy fellowship) and EMBL Heidelberg (EMBO long-term fellowship) he returned to Amsterdam in 1992 with an KNAW Academy fellowship. Since 1995 he is group leader of the Bacterial Genetics group in the Laboratory of Microbiology at Wageningen University. In that period, the group expanded from 4 to 20 persons, including two technicians, two assistant professors, three postdocs, and 13 PhD students. After obtaining an NWO-VICI grant, John was appointed Full Professor in 2005. The first ten years, the Bacterial Genetics group focused on discovery of novel enzymes, pathways and regulation systems, using integrated approaches of molecular genetics, biochemical and genomics. In addition, optimization of enzymes was performed by using laboratory evolution. From 2005 onwards, a new research line was initiated, addressing microbial host-virus interactions. Initially the focus was on the E.coli CRISPR-Cas system (NWO-VICI; 2005), later moving to prokaryotic variants of the Argonaute nuclease (NWO-TOP; 2010, NWO-ECHO; 2013), and to a novel CRISPR nuclease Cpf1/Cas12 (NWO-TOP; 2015). Over the years, John was involved in a wide range of collaborative projects with academic and industrial groups. He has been coordinator of an EU project and a Marie Curie Research Training Network. Recently he successfully participated as PI in establishing an NWO-Gravitation consortium on Building a Synthetic Cell (2017). In 2013 he was elected as EMBO member, in 2017 as member of the Royal Dutch Academy for Arts and Sciences (KNAW), and in 2019 as member of the Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen (KHMW). He is author of >285 peer-reviewed scientific papers (>25,000 citations), has an H-index >75, and is inventor of 25 patents. In 2018 he received the prestigious Spinoza prize.