FMS member Dr. Tom de Greef was last October 1, 2016, promoted to associate professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology.
Tom de Greef was born in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, in 1980 and studied at the University of Eindhoven (TU/e, the Netherlands), where he received his M.Sc. degree in Biomedical Engineering cum laude in 2004. He completed his Ph.D. at the Department of Chemistry at the same university in 2008 with professors E. W. Meijer and R. P. Sijbesma working on novel polymeric materials based on quadruple hydrogen bonding motifs. Subsequently, he moved to the Computational Biology group headed by prof. P. A. J. Hilbers at the Department of Biomedical Engineering (TU/e) studying self-assembling systems from a computational perspective and became assistant professor in this department in 2010. In 2013, Tom de Greef was a visiting scholar in the group of Prof. D. Weitz (Harvard) working on protein affinity screening using droplet microfluidics.
The overall aim of the group is the design and construction of synthetic signalling networks and chemical information processing systems in-vitro that can generate complex spatiotemporal behaviors that are typically associated with living systems. They use experiments, micro-engineering tools and modeling to reveal how networks of biochemical interactions cause and control complex regulatory behavior in an attempt to formulate generalizable design principles. In 2012 and 2013 Tom de Greef was awarded a VENI and an ECHO-STIP grant respectively by the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO). In 2015 he received an ERC starting Grant to expand research his research in the field of synthetic biology. He is also core member of the Institute for Complex Molecular Systems (ICMS).
