Gijsje Koenderink appointed as KNAW member

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) has selected Gijsje Koenderink as new KNAW member. She will join the Academy together with 16 other leading scientists. The new members will be installed on 30 September 2024.

Pioneer in materials science of living matter

Gijsje Koenderink is an expert on the role of mechanical forces in living cells and tissues. Her research is at the interface of physics, materials science, biology and the biomedical sciences. She investigates how cells and tissues respond to mechanical forces. She combines this fundamental research with more applied research on the role of disrupted mechanical properties of cells and tissues in cancer and fibrosis. Koenderink is also a pioneer in synthetic cell biology, a field in which the aim is to build a fully functional cell from non-living parts. In the Dutch Research Council’s Gravitation Programme BaSyC - Building a Synthetic Cell, she is working to construct artificial membranes that will grow and divide on their own.

Career path

Gijsje Koenderink studied physical chemistry at Utrecht University (MSc 1998, Ph.D. 2003) and then trained as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the VU University Amsterdam (2003-2004) and Harvard University (2004-2006). She started her Biological Soft Matter group at the AMOLF Institute in Amsterdam in 2019, where she also headed the Living Matter Department (2014-2019). In  september 2019, she transferred her group to Delft. In 2022, she was appointed as Medical Delta professor at the ErasmusMC and also as co-director of the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Delft in 2022.