Marileen Dogterom

Marileen Dogterom (born 20 November 1967, in Utrecht) is a Dutch biophysicist and professor at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University of Technology. She published in Science, Cell, and Nature and is notable for her research of the cell cytoskeleton. For this research, she was awarded the 2018 Spinoza Prize. Life and career Dogterom was born 20 November 1967 in Utrecht, the Netherlands. In 1990, she graduated from the University of Groningen with a degree in theoretical physics. Two years later, the Fulbright Program granted her a fellowship. Though she found a PhD position at the University of Paris-Sud, she followed her mentor (Stanislas Leibler) move to Princeton University, where Dogterom first began to work with biology via collaboration with their biology faculty. In 1994, she graduated cum laude with a doctorate from the University of Paris-Sud, with a thesis on "Physical Aspects of Microtubule Growth and Mitotic Spindle Formation," and worked as a postdoc at Bell Labs in the United States. In 1997, she became a project leader at FOM Institute AMOLF, a physics and biophysics research institute, becoming head of department from 2003 to 2013. Dogterom holds professional ties to various universities. In 2000, she took an appointment as a professor at Leiden University, becoming a full professor in 2010. Since 2014, she has been the Chair of the Department of Bionanoscience at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University of Technology. In 2016, she gained the title of "Medical Delta Professor," meaning she had professorships at both Delft and Leiden. In 2006, Dogterom took a sabbatical for a year to work at Erasmus MC in Anna Akhmanova's research group, which specialized in cell biology and cytoskeletons. In 2013, they received an ERC Synergy grant to collaborate on research on cytoskeleton regulation by the cell.