12 Facts About Cees Dekker

Cees Dekker is known for his research on carbon nanotubes, single-molecule biophysics, and nanobiology.

In 1988 Cees Dekker started his academic career as Assistant Professor at the University of Utrecht; in these years he worked in the United States as Visiting Researcher at IBM Research.

From 2010 until 2018, Cees Dekker acted as the Director of the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft.

Cees Dekker has been awarded a number of national and international prizes, including the 2001 Agilent Europhysics Prize, the 2003 Spinozapremie, the 2012 Nanoscience Prize, and the 2021 Nano Research Award.

Cees Dekker was granted an honorary doctorate from Hasselt University, Belgium.

In recognition of his achievements, Cees Dekker was elected Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003, Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics and in 2014 he was awarded Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion.

Cees Dekker started his research on single carbon nanotubes in 1993 when he set up a new line of research to study electrical transport through single organic molecules between nanoelectrodes.

Since 2000, Cees Dekker has shifted the main focus of his work towards biophysics where he studies the properties of single biomolecules and cells using the tools of nanotechnology.

Cees Dekker is a Christian and active in the discussion about the relationship between science and religion, a topic on which he has co-edited several books.

In 2005 Cees Dekker became involved in Netherlands-wide discussions about Intelligent Design, a movement that he has since clearly distanced himself from.

Cees Dekker wrote the foreword to the Dutch translation of 'The Language of God' by Francis Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health.

Cees Dekker has more than 400 publications, including more than 30 papers in Nature and Science.