Team:TU Eindhoven/Supervisors

Maarten Merkx

Maarten Merkx (1970) studied chemistry (cum laude) at the Radboud University Nijmegen and did his PhD with Prof. Averill (University of Amsterdam, 1995-1999) studying metalloenzyme catalysis. He was a Human Frontier of Science Program (HFSP) post-doctoral fellow with Prof. Stephen J. Lippard (MIT, Cambridge, USA) studying methane monooxgenases. His current research as an associate professor in the BMT department focuses on the development of protein-based switches, which include fluorescent sensors for intracellular imaging of small molecules, photo-switchable proteins, and protein-based sensors for antibody detection. Another important topic is the engineering of multivalent protein and peptides architectures to generate highly specific capture ligands for molecular imaging and diagnostics. He obtained several prestigious grants, including young investigator grants from the HFSP and the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO-VIDI, 2006), and more recently an ERC independent researcher starting grant (2011).

Tom de Greef

Tom de Greef was born in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, in 1980 and studied at the University of Eindhoven (TU/e, the Netherlands), where he received his M.Sc. degree in Biomedical Engineering cum laude in 2004. He completed his Ph.D. at the Department of Chemistry at the same university in 2008 with professors E. W. Meijer and R. P. Sijbesma working on novel polymeric materials based on quadruple hydrogen bonding motifs. Subsequently, he moved to the Biomodeling and Bioinformatics group headed by prof. P. A. J. Hilbers at the Department of Biomedical Engineering (TU/e) studying self-assembling systems from a computational perspective and became assistant professor in this department in 2010. In 2013, Tom de Greef was a visiting scholar in the group of Prof. D. Weitz (Harvard) working on protein affinity screening using droplet microfluidics. Current research themes are centered on the engineering of artificial cellular systems (bottom-up synthetic biology) with the aim to rationalize physicochemical design principles of biological systems and to develop novel biotechnological applications. In this multidisciplinary work he combines his fascination for (bio)chemistry, mathematical modeling, microfluidics and complex systems. In 2012 and 2013 he was awarded a VENI and an ECHO-STIP grant respectively by the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO). He is also core member of the Institute for Complex Molecular Systems (ICMS).