Sijbren Otto

Presentation title: Systems chemistry: Selective formation of oligomers driven by folding and self-assembly

Sijbren received his M.Sc. (1994) and Ph.D. (1998) degrees cum laude from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He worked on physical organic chemistry in aqueous solutions in the group of Prof. Jan B. F. N. Engberts. In 1998 he moved to the United States for a year as a postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Steven L. Regen (Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania) investigating synthetic systems mediating ion transport through lipid bilayers.

In 1999 he received a Marie Curie Fellowship and moved to the University of Cambridge where he worked for two years with Prof. Jeremy K. M. Sanders on dynamic combinatorial libraries.

Sijbren started his independent research career in 2001 as a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge in the UK and accepted an appointment as Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen in 2009 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2011 and Full Professor in 2016. He is director of the Chemistry MSc degree program.

Sijbren was awarded ERC starting (2010) and advanced (2017) grants from the EU and a VICI grant from NWO in the Netherlands and is one of six main applicants of the prestigious national gravitation program on Functional Molecular Systems (FMS). He is joint editor-in-chief of the re-launched Journal of Systems Chemistry and chaired COST Action CM1304 on the subject of Systems Chemistry uniting more than 90 European research groups.