Rob Hooft is lead of the Omics-data working group of Health-RI, a Dutch infrastructure preparing health-data for re-use, and Technical coordinator of the Dutch node in the European ELIXIR infrastructure for life science data.
He was educated as a structural chemist at Utrecht University with a major on Maximum Entropy methods in X-ray diffraction and PhD studies on structural aspects of sweet tasting compounds. For this study he developed several computational methods. Rob spent 4 years for a postdoctoral position at the EMBL in Heidelberg where he developed tools to verify the quality of protein structure determinations. After that he worked in industry from 1997 to 2009 first developing the software for researchers using X-ray diffraction machines, and later managing the R&D department.
In 2009 Rob joined the Netherlands center for Bioinformatics (NBIC) as CTO for the service-directed program BioAssist. Rob has been building up a body of knowledge on FAIR research data stewardship since early 2014.This work in research support grew into his current function as lead of the Omics-data working group of Health-RI.