Willem M. de Vos studied Biochemistry and obtained a PhD at Groningen University, partly done at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin. He has been over 30 years Professor at Wageningen University, was Chair of Microbiology for 25 years, and lately served as Distinguished Professor before he stepped down as Emeritus. In parallel he also served over 15 years at the University of Helsinki where he was Professor of Human Microbiomics and Director of the Human Microbiome Research Program at the Medical Faculty and is now Emeritus. He is also Visiting Professor at the Amsterdam University Medical Center.
He has supervised over 120 PhD students and with these and other collaborators he published over 850 peer-reviewed publications. He is an inventor of over 50 patents or patent applications and has presently a Google Scholar h-index of > 200 with >200,000 citations and is number #1 cited author in Microbiology, Bacterial Genetics and Microbial Ecology. He is a member of the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), the European Academy of Microbiology, and various international Scientific Advisory Boards. He has received early career prizes for international PhD and post-doc stays, including EMBO, MPI, FEBS and CEC Fellowships, and various career awards, including the Miles Marschall Rhone-Poulenc International Dairy Science Award, the NWO Spinoza Award, and the
Netherlands’ Most Entrepreneurial Scientist Award. He is also Honorary Member of the Royal Netherlands Society for Microbiology as well as the Netherlands Biotechnology Society.
He was elected as Finland Distinguished Professor and Finland Academy Professor of the Finnish Academy of Sciences. He received a Swedish Honorary Doctorate in Medicine, ERC Advanced and PoC Grants, and a Royal Knighthood in the Order of the Netherlands Lion. He serves in various scientific, advisory and supervisory boards of international research organizations, multinational companies, and start-ups. His research aims to understand and exploit microbes using molecular, (meta)genomics and systems approaches. His current
interest is focused on the human intestinal tract microbiota and its relations with health and disease in early life and adults. He (co)founded various start-ups in the microbiome space and several of these developed products that reached the market place.
www.flogen.org/
