Albert J. R. Heck

Albert Heck studied chemistry at the VU University in Amsterdam and received his Ph.D. in 1993 at the University of Amsterdam. After a postdoctoral period at Stanford University in the lab of Richard Zare and Sandia National Laboratories (Livermore) he became a postdoctoral fellow and later lecturer at University of Warwick. In 1998 he accepted a chair at Utrecht University as head of the Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics Group. His group is part of the Departments of Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Sciences of the Faculty of Science. Since 2003 Heck is scientific director of the Netherlands Proteomics Centre. From 2006 until 2012 Heck was scientific director of the Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Research at the Utrecht University. He is a council member of HUPO Proteomics Standards Initiative (PSI) and since 2011 coordinator of PRIME-XS, a European collaboration in the field of proteomics. In 2013, Heck received the Discovery Award in Proteomic Sciences from HUPO and since 2014 he is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization. In 2014, Heck was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2017 became recipient of the Spinoza Award, the highest scientific award in the Netherlands.