He was born in the Netherlands and is the Chief of the Section on Biophysical NMR Spectroscopy at the National Institutes of Health.
He studied at Delft University of Technology where he got his engineer's degree (Ir.
He worked as a postdoc with Gary Maciel at Colorado State University, before joining the NIH's Laboratory of Chemical Physics in 1983.
He collaborated extensively with fellow NIH scientists Marius Clore, Angela Gronenborn and Dennis Torchia in the development of multidimensional protein NMR.
[6][7] He was also heavily involved in the development of using residual dipolar couplings[8] and chemical shifts[9] for determining RNA[10] and protein structures.