Alexander van Oudenaarden


Alexander van Oudenaarden is a Dutch biophysicist and systems biologist. He is a leading researcher in stem cell biology, specialising in single cell techniques. In 2012 he started as director of the Hubrecht Institute and was awarded two times an ERC Advanced Grant, in 2012 and in 2017. In 2014 he became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the Spinoza Prize in 2017.

Biography

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 an MSc degree in Materials Science and Engineering and an MSc degree in Physics, both in 1993, and subsequently a PhD degree in Physics in 1998 in experimental condensed matter physics, under the supervision of professor J.E. Mooij. He received the Andries Miedema Award for his thesis on "Quantum vortices and quantum interference effects in circuits of small tunnel junctions". In 1998, he moved to Stanford University, 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. In 2017 he received his second ERC Advanced Grant, for his study titled "a single-cell genomics approach integrating gene expression, lineage, and physical interactions". He was awarded the Spinoza Prize in 2017.
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