Since 2004 Wijnands has been part of the faculty with the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
He received his PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 1999 with a thesis entitled "Millisecond phenomena in X-ray binaries".
His research focuses on the accretion of matter onto neutron stars and black holes, which are very compact stellar remnants.
He also investigates the rate at which neutron stars cool after they have been heated by accretion, in order to learn about their interior composition.
[2] In 2006 Wijnands received the Bruno Rossi Prize along with Deepto Chakrabarty and Tod Strohmayer "for their pioneering research which revealed millisecond spin periods and established the powerful diagnostic tool of kilohertz intensity oscillations in accreting neutron star binary systems".