Marileen Dogterom, Professor of Bionanoscience at TU Delft has been President of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since June 2022. She combines the presidency with her scientific work.

Marileen Dogterom is an internationally acclaimed researcher. She is one of the pioneers in the field of biomolecular and cellular physics. Her research focuses on the cytoskeleton: the microtubules that give living cells their shape and mechanical function, and that enable cells to divide successfully. Dogterom builds parts of cells in the controlled environment of her laboratory, giving her a quantitative understanding of the workings of the cytoskeleton. Her research is crucial to the development of synthetic cells. Dogterom leads a national consortium BaSyC (“Building a Synthetic Cell”) as one of the means of attempting to understand the processes of life by building cellular modules from the bottom-up. In addition, she co-leads SynCellEU, an initiative that aims to promote community building and research collaboration on this topic within Europe, as well as collaboration with similar communities in the USA and Asia.

Marileen Dogterom was trained as a physicist in Groningen and performed her PhD research work at the CEA in Saclay France and Princeton USA, followed by a postdoc at Bell Laboratories New Jersey. She moved back to the Netherlands in 1997, where she headed the biophysics department of the NWO institute AMOLF in Amsterdam before moving to Delft to head the Bionanoscience Department of the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience (2014-2021). She holds professorships at both TU Delft and Leiden University.

For her work she received several (international) awards among which an ERC Synergy Grant and the Dutch Spinoza Prize in 2018. She is a fellow of the Biophysical Society (USA) and an EMBO as well as Academia Europaea member. She was elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016, became board member in 2017, vice-president and coordinator of foreign activities in 2020 and president in 2022 (until 2026). In 2025 she was elected member of Leopoldina, the German National Academy of Sciences.

Marileen Dogterom was a member of IAP’s policy board (2019-2022) and as Academy president she represents the Netherlands in the European Science Advisors Forum (ESAF) and the OECD Global Science Forum. Since 2024, she is also a member of UNESCO’s International Bioethics Committee, which works on the ethical and legal issues raised by research in the life sciences and their applications.