Dijk attended the Meander College in Zwolle. He obtained a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science (Cum Laude) in Biology at the University of Groningen. He received his Doctor of Philosophy from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Groningen in 1988, under supervision of the biologist Serge Daan, the physicist Domien Beermsa and the psychiatrist Rutger van den Hoofdakker.
As of 2014 he is a Professor at the and the director of its Sleep Centre. Education and Early The focus of his research was on testing the predictions of the two-process model of sleep regulation as developed by Alexander Borbely (1982), Serge Daan. and Domien Beersma (1984) Dijk then conducted post-doctoral research at the Institute of Pharmacology at the University of Zurich with Alexander Borbely and was a Faculty Member at Harvard Medical School and an associated neuroscientist at the Brigham and Women"s Hospital, Boston Master of Arts, working closely with Charles Czeisler. Dijk returned to Europe in 1999 to take up a faculty position at the Dijk created the Surrey Sleep Centre in 2003 and remains its Director, leading a team that investigates the regulation and function of sleep and biological rhythms at many different levels of organisation, from gene expression to cognition.
In 2005 he became a Professor of Sleep and Physiology and was named Associate Dean (research) for the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences in 2013 Dijk is also the Director of Sleep-Wake in the "s Clinical Centre Derk-January Dijk is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Sleep, the official journal of the European Sleep Society Dijk"s research focusses on the regulation and function of sleep and its interaction with the circadian timing system in humans.
He examines how sleep, sleep regulation and circadian rhythms change across the lifespan and how sleep and circadian rhythms are affected by environmental factors such as natural and artificial light. Dijk also investigates how insufficient sleep and mistimed sleep affects brain function and performance and the patterns of gene expression.
He researches how individual differences in preferred timing of sleep is related to the biological clock and genetic variations. Dijk serves as a consultant to the pharmaceutical and lighting industry.
1987: Demonstrated that sleep timing can be shifted by bright light 1988: Identified gender differences in human sleep 1994/5: Characterized the circadian process regulating human sleep 1999: Discovered how circadian regulation of sleep changes with ageing 2004: Discovered melatonin"s effects on human sleep timing 2007: Demonstrated the effects of changes in a "clock" gene on human sleep and performance 2008: Conducted first large scale field trial to test the effect of blue light in the workplace 2009: Discovered of the daily and seasonal variation in the spectral composition of light exposure.
2010: Discovered that older people are less sleepy than young people 2012: Discovered association between circadian clock and sleep timing during the week and the weekend 2013: Demonstrated that one week of insufficient sleep alters gene expression in humans 2014: Demonstrated that mistimed sleep disrupts the circadian organization of the human blood transcriptome Honours and
Dijk is a Fellow of the Society of Biology. Dijk"s pioneering sleep-wake research was recognised with a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award in April 2013 Dijk"s sustained and significant contribution to sleep research was recognized by the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Sleep Society in 2015. This award is the highest award presented by the Sleep Society and honors a single individual for research contributions made over an entire career.
