Since January 2020, Justin van der Hooft has been an assistant professor at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. His research vision is to bridge the gap between what we can see in metabolomics profiles to what we can actually learn from them.
His group is working on computational metabolomics methods and tools to improve metabolite annotation in untargeted metabolomics experiments, in particular for natural product discovery.
The overarching aim of his research is to better understand the chemical language of nature, so we can stimulate beneficial interactions to create more resilient ecosystems, such as by finding the rightly composed soil microbiome that result in drought-tolerant plants.
Justin has always been fascinated by the chemical diversity in nature, and this bridges nicely to what NAICONS is doing when mining for novel bioactive molecules in its large bacterial strain collection.