Ivar de Jong Research Assistant 
Hi, I am Ivar. I am working as a research assistant in the group. I am fascinated by the versatility of nature, and I am eager to find new ways to apply this in engineered organisms.
About Me
I did my B.Sc. at Wageningen University (WUR) in the Netherlands, where I studied Biotechnology. During this time, I got introduced to synthetic biology and metabolic/genetic engineering. I got fascinated by these disciplines and decided to pursue them during my studies. During my B.Sc. thesis I worked with Arabidopsis plants in the Biochemistry department of WUR. Here, I did research on genes that regulate cell fate during the earliest divisions in the Arabidopsis root stem cells. For my master’s, I studied Biotechnology at WUR, specializing in cellular and molecular biotechnology. I did my M.Sc. thesis in the Systems and Synthetic biology department at WUR where I worked on introducing a phosphite-auxotrophy system in Pseudomonas putida as a part of the research on biocontainment strategies. As a part of my M.Sc. studies, I also did a research internship at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Golm (Germany) in the Systems and Synthetic Metabolism group. Here I did research on the toxicity of fluorinated compounds in Pseudomonas putida. Also, after graduation I did a short-term research assistant position at the Bioprocess engineering department at WUR, where I worked with viruses that infect microalgae as a potential production platform for pharmaceuticals.