Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Prof. Dr Willem Stiekema will soon take leave of the Centre for BioSystems Genomics. After 26 years and various positions at Wageningen UR, he will as of 1 May 2009 join the Vrije Universiteit and the University of Amsterdam as Professor of Bioinformatics and quartermaster/director of Education of the yet to be founded Amsterdam Graduate School of Science (AGSS).
Willem Stiekema has, right from the very beginning, been involved in the setting up of genomics research in the Netherlands. He was one of the persons who submitted the Strategic Action Plan Genomics in 2000 that laid the basis for the Advisory Committee Knowledge Infrastructure Genomics (Committee Wijffels), which in April 2001 gave a positive advice on a government investment of € 272 million in genomics research.
The goal of AGSS is to further improve collaboration between both universities and also to strengthen the position of Amsterdam as a knowledge centre. AGSS aims to organize joint Master programmes as well as the course-based part of the PhD training in the natural and life sciences for both universities. It is part of the growing array of collaborations in the area of science between the two Amsterdam universities. To reach this goal, the Executive Boards of both universities have appointed Willem Stiekema as AGSS Coordinator as of May 1st , 2009.
Willem J. Stiekema (1950) graduated in Biology in 1975 at the University of Amsterdam and received his PhD at the VU University Amsterdam in 1980. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Biology Department, UCLA at Los Angeles, USA he started as postdoc at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Wageningen University (WU) in 1983 and moved to the DLO research institute ITAL in 1984. Subsequently he has held management functions at the research institutes CPO, CPRO-DLO and Plant Research International.
In 1999 he was appointed as Professor of Genome Informatics at WU and in 2002 as director of the Centre for BioSystems Genomics (CBSG). CBSG is a Centre of Excellence within the Netherlands Genomics Initiative (NGI; www.genomics.nl) and is a collaboration between 5 universities, 2 research institutes, 13 plant breeding companies and 2 branch organisations with a budget of ~ € 100 million over the period 2003-2013 (www.cbsg.nl ). In 2008 NGI approved the second 5-year research plan of CBSG which comprises a programme employing 100+ researchers.
Until May 1st, 2009 he also remains the coordinator of the Integrated Project EU-SOL that is partly financed by the EC. CBSG and EU-SOL both focus on the improvement of potato and tomato for consumer, producer and processor through the use of genomics technologies and bioinformatics. Additionally CBSG and EU-SOL contribute substantially to the International Tomato and Potato Genome Sequencing Projects.