Rate My Professor Cees Dekker

Cees Dekker is Distinguished University Professor and KNAW Royal Academy Professor at Delft University of Technology in the Faculty of Applied Sciences. He received his PhD in Physics from the University of Utrecht in 1988, after completing studies in Experimental Physics there from 1977 to 1983. Trained as a solid-state physicist, Dekker pioneered research on carbon nanotubes in the 1990s, discovering their quantum coherent molecular wire behavior, chirality-dependent semiconducting or metallic properties, and applications in single-electron transistors and logic circuits at room temperature. In 1993, he joined TU Delft as Associate Professor, becoming Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Full Professor in 1999 and Full Professor of Molecular Biophysics in 2000. He founded the Department of Bionanoscience, serving as its Founding Chair from 2010 to 2013, and directed the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Delft from 2010 to 2018. Currently, he leads the €51 million NWO Zwaartekracht program NanoFront and heads the Cees Dekker Lab.

Since shifting to nanobiology around 2000, Dekker's research has centered on single-molecule biophysics, including DNA translocation through solid-state nanopores, chromatin organization via loop extrusion by condensin and cohesin complexes, bacterial cell division on chips, nuclear pore complexes, and bottom-up construction of synthetic cells. He has published over 300 papers, achieving an h-index of 122 and over 85,000 citations. Notable publications include "Real-time imaging of DNA loop extrusion by condensin" (Science, 2018), "DNA-loop extruding condensin complexes can traverse one another" (Nature, 2020), "Paving the Way to Single-Molecule Protein Sequencing" (Nature Nanotechnology, 2018), and "Solid-state nanopores, a new single-molecule tool for biophysics and biotechnology" (Nature Nanotechnology, 2007). His contributions have earned major awards such as the 2003 Spinoza Prize, 2001 Agilent Europhysics Prize, 2012 ISNSCE Nanoscience Prize, 2017 NanoSmat Prize, three ERC Advanced Grants (2009, 2015, 2020), and knighthood as Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion in 2014. Dekker is an elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and Institute of Physics.