Ronald Plasterk

Ronald Hans Anton Plasterk (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈroːnɑlt ˈɦɑns ˈɑntɔm ˈplɑstɛr(ə)k]; born 12 April 1957) is a Dutch retired politician of the Labour Party (PvdA). He has a PhD degree in biology, specialising in molecular genetics. He is founder and CEO of Frame Cancer Therapeutics. He was appointed professor at the University of Amsterdam in September 2018.

Education and scientific career

Plasterk was born in The Hague, and he attended the Sint Janscollege secondary school at gymnasium level between 1969 and 1975. He then studied biology at the Leiden University and economics at the University of Amsterdam. During this period, he wrote for the student newspaper and served as treasurer of the Augustinus student association. In 1981, he obtained an MSc degree Cum Laude in biology. He obtained his propaedeutic diploma in economics in the same year. From 1981 to 1984 he worked as a researcher at the biomedical institute of Leiden University before earning his PhD degree in mathematics and natural science in 1984. He did genetic research into flatworms for his thesis entitled "Inversion of the G segment of bacteriophage Mu: analysis of a genetic switch".

Between 1985 and 1986, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. There he studied the transposon sequences in DNA in the parasite Borrelia hermsii. Between 1986 and 1987 he was a post-doc at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where he worked with John Sulston. He studied Caenorhabditis elegans, a nematode that is used as a model organism.