Bert Poolman

Poolman has been Chair of the KNAW Earth and Life Sciences Board, and has been vice-chair of KNAW Council for Natural and Technical Sciences since 2017. From 2016 to 2018, he was a member of the Dutch Council for Physics and Chemistry, and currently he is a member of the core team of the Council for Chemistry. Since 2009 he led the focus area on ‘Biomolecular and Bioinspired Functionality’ at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials (University of Groningen, together with Nobel laureate Ben Feringa, and, from 2010 to 2017, he managed a national Synthetic Biology program of the University of Groningen.

Berend (Bert) Poolman is a Dutch biochemist, as specialist in bioenergetics of microorganisms and membrane transport. He is a professor of Biochemistry at the University of Groningen and an elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) since 2009. Poolman is a pioneer in the field of bottom-up synthetic biology, that is, the construction from molecular building blocks of functional metabolic networks and autonomously operating functional systems, which are typical of living cells. Poolman is a lecturer in membrane biology and synthetic biology.

He obtained four TOP program grants from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)(2001, 2007, 2010, 2014)., two program grants from the Netherlands Proteomics Centre (2005 en 2008), and coordinated three large European networks (1996, 1999 and 2012). In 2015 he received an ERC Advanced Grant and in 2019 an ERC Proof-of-Concept Grant, and in 2017 the BaSyC consortium (with Poolman as one of the lead principal investigators) was awarded a multimillion Dutch Gravitation grant.

Poolman has received numerous awards, including the Biochemistry Award (1989) of the Dutch Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Organisation (NVBMB), a Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences fellowship (1989), an Human Frontiers Science Program Organization award (1992), the SON ‘Jonge Chemici’ award (1997), the Federation European Biochemical Society Lecturer Award (2014), and the Joel Mandelstam Memorial Lecture award (2016).

Poolman pursued studies in Biochemistry and Microbiology at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and the University of Bern (Switzerland), obtaining a MSc degree in 1984. He gained his PhD in 1987 with a thesis on bioenergetics of streptococci, under the supervision of Wil Konings and Hans Veldkamp. After a brief stint as a scientist at Genencor Inc (now Dupont Industrial Biosciences) in San Francisco (USA), he returned to the Netherlands in the end of 1989 to start his own research group on biochemistry and molecular biology of membrane transport at the University of Groningen, supported by a fellowship from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been professor of biochemistry at the Groningen since 1998. In 2008 he was appointed Program Director of its Centre for Synthetic Biolog), and in 2013 he became Scientific Director of its Biomolecular Sciences and Biotechnology Institute. In 1993 Poolman has done a sabbatical at Transgene SA, Strasbourg (France). Thanks to a Fulbright fellowship, he was visiting professor in biochemistry at California Institute of Technology, Pasadena (USA) in 2003.

Poolman was born in 1959 as the first son of Jelto Poolman and Neeltje Prinsse. In 1983 he married Heleen Stevenson (1959), with whom he has four children.