Citizenship The Netherlands Name Alexander Oudenaarden | Institutions Hubrecht Institute Residence Netherlands | |
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Books Quantum Vortices and Quantum Interference Effects in Circuits of Small Tunnel Junctions Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Natural Sciences, US & Canada Fields | ||
Spinozalaureaat 2017 - Alexander van Oudenaarden
Alexander van Oudenaarden (19 March 1970) is a Dutch biophysicist and systems biologist. He is a leading researcher in systems biology and synthetic biology, specialising in stochasticity in gene networks and actin dynamics. In 2012 he started as director of the Hubrecht Institute and was awarded an ERC Advanced Investigator award and NWO VICI award. In 2014 he became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).
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Biography
Alexander van Oudenaarden was born 19 March 1970, in Zuidland, a small town in the Dutch province of South Holland. He studied at the Delft University of Technology, where he obtained a Masters of Science in Materials Science and Engineering (cum laude) and a Masters of Science in Physics in 1993, and a Ph.D. in Physics (cum laude) in 1998 in experimental condensed matter physics, under the supervision of Prof. J.E. Mooij. He received the Andries Miedema Award (best Ph.D.-research in the field of condensed matter physics in the Netherlands) for his thesis on "Quantum vortices and quantum interference effects in circuits of small tunnel junctions". In 1998 he moved to Stanford, where he was a postdoctoral researcher in the departments of Biochemistry and of Microbiology & Immunology, working on force generation of polymerising actin filaments in the Theriot lab and a postdoctoral researcher in the department of Chemistry, working on Micropatterning of supported phospholipid bi-layers in the Boxer lab. In 2000 he joined the department of Physics at MIT as an assistant professor, was tenured in 2004 and is now a full professor. In 2001 he received the NSF CAREER award, and was both an Alfred Sloan Research Fellow and the Keck Career Development Career Development Professor in Biomedical Engineering. In 2012 Alexander became the director of the Hubrecht Institute as the successor of Hans Clevers.
He is married and has three children.
Work
During his time at MIT his lab started with parallel lines of research in actin dynamics and noise in gene networks, and then focused on stochasticity in gene networks biological networks as control systems, and the evolution of small networks.
Today, Van Oudenaardens work at the Hubrecht Institute focuses on stochastic gene expression, developing new tools for quantifying gene expression in single cells and MicroRNAs