Prof. Dr. Maarten Merkx

Prof. Dr. Maarten Merkx became the dean of the TU/e department of Biomedical Engineering in November 2019, where he studied physical organic chemistry and biochemistry at the Radboud University Nijmegen (1995, cum laude). He did his PhD with Prof. Averill (1999, University of Amsterdam) working on purple acid phosphatases, and was an HSFP post-doctoral fellow with Prof. Lippard (MIT, 1999-2001). Currently he is a full professor in protein engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology, a core member of the Institute for Complex Molecular Systems (ICMS) and dean of the department of Biomedical Engineering. He obtained young investigator grants from NWO (VIDI 2006), an ERC Consolidator grant in 2011, and an ERC Proof of Concept grant in 2014 and 2017.

As the only Dutch scientist, he was invited in 2015 to speak at the World Economic forum in a session on the future of synthetic biology. In 2017, he reached the media with his expertise on DNA computing, amongst others an article on wired.com, and in 2019, he received an NWO Take Off grant to map the commercial possibilities of his glow-in-the-dark paper-based assays for point-of-care diagnostics. Furthermore, he was awarded multiple times as best teacher in the master’s program, and received the award for the best TU/e teacher at the master level in 2012. In November 2019, he became the dean of the TU/e department of Biomedical Engineering.