Wouter is Director of Corporate Development at Illumina Inc., where his main focus is venture investing and M&A. Since joining Illumina in 2009, he has also held roles in R&D and Product Development, where he was instrumental in the development of sequencing platforms such as the MiSeq, sourcing and evaluate new technology opportunities, and emerging threat assessment.
An electrochemist by training he made his debut in life sciences in 2003 as first hire for Oxford University spin-out Oxamer, a company founded by Lasker-award winner Prof. Sir Edwin Southern, contributing to the development of a benchtop DNA microarray fabrication platform. Following Oxamer’s merger with Oxford Gene Technology he continued working alongside Southern, leading R&D on single cell gene expression analysis and novel applications for DNA microarrays.
Wouter obtained a joint BSc/MSc (magna cum laude) in Chemistry from the University of Ghent, Belgium, a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Newcastle, U.K, and an MBA from the University of Cambridge, U.K.
As a past i-Teams team member, Wouter then moved on to mentoring several projects:
- Finding real-world applications for a synthetic reversible molecular lego system (Michaelmas 2011)
- Finding biomedical uses for a low-cost portable tuneable laser (Easter 2012)
- Lowering the cost of purifying cell populations and biopharmaceutical molecules (Michaelmas 2012)
- Capturing industrial CO2 emissions and adding value to large-scale mining wastes: two markets, one technology (Easter 2014)