prof.dr. Jeroen van Zon
CV / Biography
Jeroen van Zon obtained his degree in Physics (2002) and his PhD degree in Theoretical Physics (2006) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. For his PhD research, he worked on the statistical physics of granular materials with Prof. Fred MacKintosh and on the modelling of biological networks with Prof. Pieter Rein ten Wolde (AMOLF). In 2006, he moved to Imperial College London, where he continued modelling biological systems, working with Prof. Martin Howard on the mechanics of phagocytosis and on the regulation of DNA segregation in bacteria, both in close collaboration with biologists. In 2008, he was awarded a Human Frontier Science Program fellowship to work as a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) in the group of Prof. Alexander van Oudenaarden, where he performed experiments to study the role of molecular noise and variability in cell fate patterning during organ development in the nematode worm C. elegans.
He started as independent group leader at AMOLF in 2012, using advanced microscopy, AI-driven image processing, quantitative analysis and mathematical modelling to study developmental biology. Work in the group focuses both on development in C. elegans and in different organoid models for mouse and human organs. Since 2025 he holds in addition a position as professor in Quantitative Developmental Biology at the Institute of Biologie Leiden (IBL) at Leiden University.
