Nynke Dekker joins FOM Executive Board with effect from 1 January 2012
Professor Nynke Dekker has been appointed as a member of the Executive Board of FOM with effect from 1 January 2012 and will join the Governing Board of FOM with effect from 1 June 2011. She succeeds Professor Carlo Beenakker who leaves the board by the end of this year after two terms of office. Dekker (40) is professor of biophysics at Delft University of Technology and has an impressive CV. She will become the youngest member of the Executive Board and also the first woman on the board in FOM’s 65-year history.
Dekker graduated cum laude at Yale and Leiden universities and did several years of research at Harvard University where she also gained her PhD in 2000. She then did two years of postdoctoral research in Paris before setting up her own research group at Delft in 2002, which focuses on biophysics at the nanoscale. In 2009, she gave her inaugural lecture as a professor entitled: The revolution of a single molecule. Her research has resulted in a large number of publications, many of which have appeared in leading international journals.
Dekker has received many prestigious grants and awards for her work. For example, she received a European Young Investigator (EURYI) award from the European Science Foundation in 2007, from NWO a Vidi grant in 2005 and a Vici grant in 2010 and until this year, she was a member of De Jonge Akademie [The Young Academy] of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dekker is also committed to bringing science to a wider public; for example, she has been involved in the Avond van Wetenschap en Maatschappij [Science and Society Evening] on several occasions and on 29 May 2011 she will give a lecture about her research at Paradiso in Amsterdam. She is also active in the organisation of lectures and congresses and is a member of various advisory committees.
"We are therefore most pleased that Dekker is willing to contribute to the FOM organisation over the next four years," says FOM director Wim van Saarloos enthusiastically.
Further information
About Professor Nynke Dekker: nynkedekkerlab.tudelft.nl
About FOM: Gabby Zegers, +31 (0)30 600 12 08.