Erik van Nimwegen

After studying theoretical physics in Amsterdam, Erik van Nimwegen moved to the United States in 1995, performing his PhD studies at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and receiving his PhD from the Faculty of Biology at Utrecht University in 1999. After a year of post-doc studies at the SFI, he spent three years as a fellow at the Center of Studies in Physics and Biology at the Rockefeller University, in New York. Since 2003 he has been a Professor of Computational Biology at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, and group leader at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics since 2004. His main research topics concern genome evolution and the function and evolution of the regulatory networks by which cells control gene expression. He develops mathematical models for analyzing how regulatory networks evolve and function, and computational methods for the reconstruction of such networks from large biological data-sets.