Jeroen Hugenholtz

Jeroen Hugenholtz obtained a Ph.D. degree from the University of Groningen in 1986. He, subsequently, spent three years (1986—1989) in USA as postdoctoral at the University of Georgia. In 1989, he joined NIZO food research as a Project Leader; later, he became Group Leader and is currently a Principal Scientist in the area of food fermentations. His research focuses, specifically, on the physiology and genomics of anaerobic micro-organisms, with the emphasis on lactic acid bacteria. He has developed a large expertise in controlling and changing the metabolism of these bacteria by varying growth conditions and by engineering the bacteria on the level of crucial metabolic enzymes. He is an author of over 120 peer-reviewed papers and several patents. He has participated in and set up several collaborative research programs on national and international (EU) level. He was a coordinator of the recently finished EU project called “Nutra Cells” and is currently Vice-Director of the Kluyver Centre for Genomics of Industrial Fermentation. He is also a Senior Scientist in the Topinstitute Food & Nutrition within the Microbial Functionality programme and holds a chair as a Professor in the Industrial Molecular Microbiology at the University of Amsterdam. From this location, he currently serves as a Coordinator of the large European SysMO-project “Comparative Systems Biology: Lactic Acid Bacteria.“ Recent highlights from his group are the first discovery of vitamin B12-production within lactic acid bacteria, the development of mathematical models for the metabolism of lactic acid bacteria and the development of metabolic engineering strategies to increase production of different nutraceuticals (low-calorie sugars, vitamins, anti-oxidants) by lactic acid bacteria.

Biography Updated on 7 October 2008

Scholarly Contributions [Data Provided by ]