Background
Alexander van Oudenaarden was born 19 March 1970, in Zuidland, a small town in the Dutch province of South Holland.
biologist biophysicist director
Alexander 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 a Masters of Science in Materials Science and Engineering (cum laude) and a Masters of Science in Physics in 1993, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Physics (cum laude) in 1998 in experimental condensed matter physics, under the supervision of Professor J.E. Mooij.
He is a leading researcher in systems biology and synthetic biology, specialising in stochasticity in gene networks and actin dynamics. In 1998 he moved to Stanford, 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 laboratory In 2000 he joined the department of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an assistant professor, was tenured in 2004 and is now a full professor
In 2012 Alexander became the director of the Hubrecht Institute as the successor of Hans Clevers.