Rob Hooft Email & Phone Number

Netherlands

Utrecht, Netherlands

Utrecht

Operational manager of all Dutch Bioinformatics activities related to the international ELIXIR research infrastructure for life science data, including project management for the Dutch commitments in international grants.

Amsterdam Area, Netherlands

* Coordination of FAIR data implementation projects in The Life Sciences in The Netherlands

Coordinating the data programme for the Dutch Techcentre for Life Sciences (DTL): (1) Bring people from companies and academic research together into collaborations, working on common solutions together. (2) Make sure expertise in life science data (including data stewardship) is available for all life scientists in The Netherlands.

Coordinating collaboration between academic groups performing software development inside the NBIC BioAssist program. Leading a team that continues software development that was started in academic groups into broader applicable applications.

• Providing guidance to a diverse group of professionals in the development of single-crystal X-ray diffraction systems.Responsibilities: Continued responsibilities as Applications software developer. Lead a development.
• Coordinated a transition towards a LEAN development style.
• Improved collaboration between development sites by installing a search engine and shared access to documents.
• Introduced a metric measuring effective hours of the team; achieving scores >45%, 2x the average in the literature.
• Recruited seven new team members (internationally) that brought new experience into the group.
• Created yearly budget of 1M€ including materials, depreciations, salaries and subsidies.

• Responsibilities: Set up application software for Nonius new line of CCD diffraction systems. Collaborated with Utrecht University to set up a contingency software project to prevent depending on package with a single.
• Wrote application software that is respected as the most easy to use software for single crystal diffraction to date.
• Was more productive than competition with 5x more programmers using efficient programming techniques.
• Protected a method by authoring a patent documenting an invention done in collaboration with Utrecht University.
• Demonstrated to customers that the company was a valuable scientific partner in demonstrations on shows.
• Developed groundbreaking new algorithms starting from knowledge from scientific papers only.

• Responsibilities: Write verification tools for protein structures, these tools are included into the WHAT IF program. Collaborate on other aspects of the molecular modeling software WHAT IF, including the 3D graphics.
• Made protein modeling easier by creating databases of protein structural features and protein structure quality.
• Warned other scientists for the importance of quality checks by presenting results in Nature, cited 950 times.
• Kept other scientists informed by presenting results at several international scientific conferences.
• Achieved recognition by writing 4 scientific articles (as first author) describing newly developed methods.
• Helped crystallographers test the quality of their results by building a web service with the software.

• Research the structure/activity relationships of sweet tasting compounds.Accomplishments:
• Developed new (parallelized) software for modelling flexible molecules using molecular mechanics.
• Developed new software for modelling flexible molecules using molecular dynamics.
• Wrote a chapter in a book on sweet taste chemoreception.
• Solved a number of small molecule organic crystal structures.

Master, Chemistry

Studied the Maximum Entropy method in X-ray crystallography.

Education record