Alexander van Oudenaarden

Alexander van Oudenaarden is director and group leader at the Hubrecht Institute and Professor of quantitative biology of gene regulation at the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Medicine at Utrecht University. His research group combines biology with physics and informatics to gain insight in the quantitative biology of development and stem cells. They develop new techniques to quantify gene expression and study the regulation of gene expression in single cells. He is one of the pioneers of single cell RNA-sequencing and his lab has developed several bio-informatics tools to analyze these data in detail.

Van Oudenaarden’s awards include the Spinoza Award and two ERC Advanced Investigator grants. He was previously professor of physics and biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He studied materials science and physics at Delft, where he also obtained his PhD in solid state physics.