Dr. Justin van der Hooft

After obtaining his MSc in Molecular Sciences at Wageningen University, Justin took up a PhD position in analytical biochemistry where he developed methods for systematic metabolite identification and annotation with both mass spectrometry and NMR techniques. In particular, he focused on mass spectrometry fragmentation approaches to gather more structural information on measured molecules. In 2012 Justin obtained his PhD and he then moved to Glasgow where he worked on several postdoc projects including epicatechin bioavailability, drug screening, and bacterial metabolomics. It was also in Glasgow where he set up a collaboration with Dr Simon Rogers and the concept of MS2LDA to discover substructures in tandem mass spectrometry data was borne. In September 2017 Justin moved back to Wageningen to start on a joint postdoc between Prof. Pieter Dorrestein’s group at UCSD and Dr Marnix Medema’s group at WUR with the focus on combining genome and metabolome mining. In May 2018, he started on a 3-year grant from the Netherlands eScience Center that further expands the work on metabolome mining with the aim to accelerate deciphering of complex metabolic mixtures as well as the combination with genome mining for structural annotation of natural products.