Ronald Plasterk obtained his PhD at the University of Leiden in 1984. He was a post-doc in the lab of M.I. Simon at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (USA), studying DNA transposition in Borrelia hermsii, and in the lab of J. Sulston at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge (UK), investigating the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans.

From 1987 to 2000 he was group leader at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam and from 1993 to 2003 he was also Professor at the Free University of Amsterdam (Molecular Microbiology) and University of Amsterdam (Molecular Genetics) respectively.

Since February 2000 he is director of the Hubrecht Laboratory / Netherlands Institute for Developmental Biology in Utrecht, and Professor of Developmental Genetics at the University of Utrecht. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the European Molecular Biology Organization, and the Board of Governors of The Wellcome Trust.

Plasterk’s research interests are in the areas of genetics and functional genomics, studying the nematode C. elegans and more recently also the zebrafish. He focuses on the mechanism and regulation of DNA transposition by RNAi, and the function of miRNAs in development.

Since 1999 Ronald Plasterk is columnist for the “Volkskrant” (Dutch newspaper) and “Buitenhof” (Dutch television program).