Arnold Boersma

Dr. Arnold J. Boersma is an Associate Professor at the Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Research at Utrecht University and an associate scientist at the DWI-Leibniz Institute. He studied chemistry at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands), where he also pursued his master's and doctorate graduate studies in the group of Prof. Ben L. Feringa (Nobel Laureate, 2016) and Prof. Gerard Roelfes. Here, he developed a new concept in catalysis by using DNA as an asymmetric catalyst. For this research, he was awarded the KNCV Catalysis prize for the best Ph.D. thesis on catalysis in the Netherlands. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford University in the group of Prof. Hagan Bayley, funded by an NWO Rubicon grant. Here, he became an expert in protein engineering and lipid membranes. In 2012, he returned to the University of Groningen to become an independent researcher with an NWO Veni fellowship. Here, he developed novel probes to detect the physicochemical properties inside various types of cells. He was awarded an NWO Vidi grant in 2016 to become a group leader based on these research achievements. Arnold joined the DWI-Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials in August 2018 as an Independent Group Leader, where he obtained the ERC Consolidator grant in 2020. In addition, he was selected as a rising star in sensing by ACS Sensors in 2020 and appointed as faculty for the Max Planck School "Matter to Life" in 2021. He moved to Utrecht University in the summer of 2022.