Career in University

One of the career opportunities after finishing your Master is a career within University. The basic careerpath in University is PhD -> Postdoc -> Assistant Professor-> Professor. What are the positive and negative aspects? How do you make a decision to choose for this career? What are the differences with a career in Industry?  What kind of person has the biggest chance at a succesful career in Univeristy? In this lecture three speakers will try to answer these questions ans ahre a personal story with you.

The first speaker Dr. Chris de Graaf  is an Assistant Professor Computational Medicinal Chemistry at the University Amsterdam (from 2008). He will share with you how he became Assitant Professor and will also emphasize the difference between Univeristy and Industry.

Chris de Graaf studied Chemistry at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). He graduated in 2002 with judicium cum laude. From 2002 to 2006 he performed his PhD research (cum laude) in the Division Molecular Toxicology of the VU University Amsterdam. He then joined the Structural Chemogenomics group of Dr. D. Rognan at the Université de Strasbourg (France) as a post-doctoral fellow. In december 2008 he returned to the Netherlands where he joined the Division of Medicinal Chemistry, VU University Amsterdam on a tenure track position to work on membrane proteins. Chris de Graaf was appointed Assistant Professor of Computational Medicinal Chemistry at the Division of Medicinal Chemistry, VU University Amsterdam, where he is currently responsible for the computer-aided drug design research line, complementing synthetic medicinal chemistry and molecular pharmacology research programs. In 2009 he obtained a Veni grant (NWO).

The second speaker, prof. dr. Willem Kegel, is Professor at Van 't Hoff Laboratory for Physical and Colloid Chemistry at the Debye Research Institute of the University of Utrecht and will focus on the positions of Assistant Professor and Professor.

The final speaker is Marc Schmets from NWO and he will elaborate on academic career development from the governmental (NWO’s) point of view. And, how to apply successfully for NWO grants? Mark Schmets holds a Master degree in Chemistry (2006). After a half year at the Polytechnical University of St. Petersburg (Russian Federation) he started working at the Chemical & Physical Sciences Division of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Schmets is coordinator of the national Public-Private Partnership programme CatchBio on chemocatalytic biomass conversion and is involved in the European research network on Industrial Biotechnology (ERA-IB).

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