Nico Sommerdijk - Biography#

Nico Sommerdijk is professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the Radboud Institute for Molecular Life Sciences. His research focusses on the investigation of biomineralization, focussing on how (bio-)organic macromolecules can influence the formation of inorganic materials. He has pioneered the use of cryo-electron microscopy to study these organic-inorganic interactions, and more recently also used liquid phase electron microscopy for this purpose.

Sommerdijk obtained his PhD (cum laude) from Radboud University Nijmegen in 1995. From 1995-2000 he did postdoctoral at the University of Kent (UK), at Radboud University Nijmegen and subsequently at Eindhoven University of Technology where he was then appointed assistant professor. He became associate professor in 2008, full professor in 2014, and head of the Laboratory of Materials and Interface Chemistry in 2016. In Eindhoven he founded the Center of Multiscale Electron Microscopy and headed the Advanced Characterization Center of the Institute of Molecular Life Sciences.

His research has been supported by the Netherlands Science Foundation through VIDI (2006), VICI (2010) and Toppunt (2016) awards, as well as by an ERC Advanced Investigator grant (2018). We was elected chair of the GRC on Biomineralization (2016), and co-chaired the first GRC on Liquid Phase Electron Microscopy (2020).

In August 2019 he moved to Radboud University Medical Center Nijmegen where he investigates the (bio)chemistry and structure of collagen in both physiological and pathological situations, in particular the mechanisms of assembly, crosslinking and mineralization of collagen. He recently established the Radboud Electron Microscopy Center that supports the advanced electron microscopic analysis of biological materials.