Daan M. van Aalten - Deputy Chair

Daan van Aalten gained a BSc in Chemistry from the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, followed by a PhD in Biochemistry/Biocomputing at the University of Leeds. After postdoctoral work in protein crystallography at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, on an EMBO Long Term Fellowship, and at the University of Oulu, Finland, he established his own group at the University of Dundee with the help of a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship, with a research focus in the area of molecular and cellular glycobiology. In 2002 he won an EMBO Young Investigator Award, in 2004 a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship and in 2006 the Lister Prize. Daan has a personal chair in biological chemistry as of 2006, and is author on over 120 scientific papers. His current interests are the molecular basis of biogenesis of the fungal cell wall, and the role of O-GlcNAc in modulating phospho-dependent signal transduction in higher eukaryotes.