Gijsje H. Koenderink

Prof. Gijsje Koenderink is full professor in the Bionanoscience Department of the TU Delft. She studied physical chemistry at Utrecht University (MSc 1998, Ph.D. 2003) and then trained as a Marie Curie postdoctoral Fellow at the VU University Amsterdam (2003-2004) and Harvard University (2004-2006). Between 2006-2019, she headed the Biological Soft Matter group at the AMOLF Institute in Amsterdam, where she also headed the Living Matter Department (2014-2019). In september 2019, she transferred her group to TU Delft. The Koenderink lab is an experimental research group centered around the soft matter physics of living matter. The central aim is to understand the physical mechanisms that enable living matter (cells and tissues) to combine mechanical strength with the ability to actively generate forces and change shape. To this end, the team combines concepts and methods from soft matter physics, biophysics, synthetic biology, and mechanobiology. Through collaborations, the research also extends to food and biomedical materials and research into implications of abnormal cell/tissue mechanics for cancer metastasis and thrombosis. Prof. Koenderink received various distinctions, including an NWO VIDI (2008), ERC Starting Grant (2013), NWO VICI (2019), the P-G. de Gennes Prize (2018), and the Dresden Physics Prize (2020).