He obtained his PhD in Bioinformatics and Theoretical Biology from Utrecht University in 1994. He was a post-doctoral fellow at Oxford University until 1997, after which he moved back to the Netherlands to become a Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts and Sciences fellow. Since 2005, he has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam, and since 2009 he has been Programme Director of the Bachelor’s programme in Biology.

His research areas have been broad, including evolution in the primordial soup, the dynamics of infectious diseases, the evolution of cooperative behaviour and the consequences of spatial self-organisation and collective behaviour.