Marjolein Dijkstra (born 1967) is a Dutch condensed matter physicist. She works as a professor in the Debye Institute for NanoMaterials Science at

Utrecht University Utrecht University (UU; nl, Universiteit Utrecht, formerly ''Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht'') is a public research university in Utrecht, Netherlands. Established , it is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands. In 2018, it had an enrollme ...

, and the Soft Condensed Matter group of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Utrecht.

Education and career

Dijkstra was born on 26 September 1967 in

The Hague The Hague ( ; nl, Den Haag or ) is a city and municipality of the Netherlands, situated on the west coast facing the North Sea. The Hague is the country's administrative centre and its seat of government, and while the official capital of ...

. She earned two master's degrees, one in chemical engineering in 1990 from

Wageningen University Wageningen University & Research (also known as Wageningen UR; abbreviation: WUR) is a public university in Wageningen, Netherlands, specializing in life sciences with a focus on agriculture, technical and engineering subjects. It is a globally ...

under the supervision of Yehudi K. Levine and Tjeerd Schaafsma, and another in experimental physics in 1990 from Utrecht University under the supervision of

Daan Frenkel Daan Frenkel One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: (born 1948, Amsterdam) is a Dutch computational physicist in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. Education ...

. She completed her Ph.D. in 1994, with Frenkel as her doctoral advisor. Her dissertation was ''The effect of entropy on the structure and stability of complex fluids''. After postdoctoral research at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

with Paul Madden and

Jean-Pierre Hansen Jean-Pierre Hansen FRS (born 10 May 1942) is a Luxembourgian chemist and an emeritus professor of the University of Cambridge. Education Hansen gained a PhD from Paris-Sud 11 University in 1969, the same year working as a staff scientist for th ...

, at the Shell Research and Technology Centre Amsterdam, and at

Bristol University , mottoeng = earningpromotes one's innate power (from Horace, ''Ode 4.4'') , established = 1595 – Merchant Venturers School1876 – University College, Bristol1909 – received royal charter , type ...

with Michael P. Allen and Robert Evans, she joined the Utrecht faculty in 1999. She has been a full professor there since 2007, and was named director of the Debye Institute in 2015. In spring 2020 Marjolein Dijkstra received an

ERC Advanced Grant The European Research Council (ERC) is a public body for funding of scientific and technological research conducted within the European Union (EU). Established by the European Commission in 2007, the ERC is composed of an independent Scientific ...

research funding for her project ''Rational Design of Soft Hierarchical Materials with Responsive Functionalities: Machine learning Soft Matter to create Soft Machines.''.

Recognition

Dijkstra won the Minerva Prize of the

Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research The Dutch Research Council (NWO, Dutch: Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek) is the national research council of the Netherlands. NWO funds thousands of top researchers at universities and institutes and steers the course of ...

in 2000. This prize is given every two years for outstanding research by a female physicist; Dijkstra won it for her work with René van Roij and Robert Evans on "Phase diagram of highly asymmetric binary hard-sphere mixtures". Dijkstra was elected a member of the

Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences ( nl, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, abbreviated: KNAW) is an organization dedicated to the advancement of science and literature in the Netherlands. The academy is housed ...

in 2020.

References

External links

Home page
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Dijkstra, Marjolein 1967 births Living people 21st-century Dutch physicists Dutch women physicists Condensed matter physicists Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Utrecht University alumni Academic staff of Utrecht University Wageningen University and Research alumni