Antoine van Oijen spent many hours as a child reading books on astronomy. He even used his own homemade telescope for stargazing. “I was fascinated by astronomy,” van Oijen says. “I built my own telescope from a PVC pipe with a home-polished lens that gave pretty nice views.” Van Oijen’s scien­tific interests expanded when he took a high school physics class with an enthusiastic teacher. Van Oijen was inspired to pursue physics studies for his undergraduate degree at Leiden University in the Netherlands, from which he earned his Bachelor of Science degree. He was the first person in his extended family to go to university. “My father is a very intelligent and clever man, but being the oldest son in a farmer’s family, he was pulled out of school at the age of twelve to work on the farm,” he explains. “He worked hard to receive an education after he got married to my mom by studying in the evenings on top of a full-time job.”

During his undergraduate years, van Oijen had the opportunity to do bench work and enjoyed it immensely, so he decided to pursue a PhD in physics. “Most people who continued towards a PhD would move to another univer­sity, but I was having too much fun to move away,” van Oijen says. “All of my friends lived in Leiden and I was having a blast in the lab. The decision to stay in Leiden was made very quickly.”

Van Oijen has the benefit of working in a truly interdisciplinary environment with physicists, biologists, chemists, and computer engineers in his lab. “I feel privileged to continue learning from their expertise and backgrounds," he shares.

Van Oijen focused on low-temperature single-molecule spectroscopy dur­ing the first years of his PhD, and later began working with another group that was interested in photosynthesis. “We set out to perform fluorescence spectroscopy on individual photosynthetic pigment-proteins at cryogenic temperature to better understand their elec­tronic structure and the mechanisms they employ to transfer excitation energy to the photosynthetic reaction center,” van Oijen notes. Although he did not study biology at all during his graduate or undergraduate years, working on this project triggered in him an interest in biophysics that led him to pursue a postdoctoral position in biophysics.

In 2001, van Oijen started his postdoc studying single-molecule biophysics in the lab of Sunney Xie at Harvard University. Van Oijen quickly realized that he did not know any biology, so he enrolled in an introductory molecular biol­ogy course. “At 28 years of age, I was sitting in the back of one of the lecture halls at the Science Center at Harvard surrounded by a few hundred 19-year-olds,” van Oijen says. “The lectures were an absolute eye opener for me. Sup­ported by Richard Losick’s wonderful teaching style, I was blown away by the elegant and intricate molecular mechanisms that support life.” Xie admired van Oijen’s decision to delve into a new subject so fully. “When Antoine first came to Harvard as a postdoc, he knew very little biology. Yet he set out to have a career in biophysics, and went out of his way to learn biology,” Xie says. “[He had a] lack of fear of venturing into new territories.” Van Oijen was hooked on biophysics and began working to develop single-molecule techniques to visualize DNA replication, a field of inquiry that continues to dominate his career to this day.

Van Oijen went on to become an assistant profes­sor at Harvard Medical School, where he stayed for six years before moving back to the Netherlands. He then took a position as a full professor at the University of Groningen, heading up the Single- Molecule Biophysics Group at the Zernicke Insti­tute for Advanced Materials. His group focused on developing and using single-molecule biophysics techniques to study complex biological processes. “We’re using a variety of in vitro and in vivo single-molecule approaches to study how DNA replica­tion works in phage, bacterial, and eukaryotic sys­tems,” van Oijen states. “Next to this effort, we’re interested in viral fusion (how does a membrane-enveloped virus fuse its membrane with that of the target cell) and membrane transport (how do membrane transporters get small molecules from one side of the membrane to the other). We try to balance our efforts between methods development and the answering of mechanistic questions.”

As a group leader at University of Groningen, van Oijen embraced serving as a mentor and advisor to his lab members. “My favorite thing about being a professor, advisor, and mentor is discussing data with people in the lab, brainstorming about de­signing the next experiment, and coming up with mechanistic explanations. One of the most reward­ing things is when a person from the lab walks into your office, overflowing with excitement, with a piece of cool data,” says van Oijen. He has the benefit of working in a truly interdisciplinary en­virnment with physicists, biologists, chemists, and computer engineers in his lab. “I feel privileged to continue learning from their expertise and back­grounds,” he shares.

As it is for many people, the biggest challenge in van Oijen’s career thus far has been manag­ing the two-body problem. “My wife is an academic as well, and as a family we have been strug­gling for a long time to find a situation and location in which both of us have professional po­sitions that fit our ambition lev­els and keep us motivated,” he explains. Recently, van Oijen’s wife was offered her dream job at the University of Wollongong in Australia, where van Oijen also has a close collaborator. “A wonderful opportunity was created for me as well, resulting in the solution for our dual-career problem,” he says. “Plus, it is in a very nice loca­tion, with a beach close by and a nice climate. I may finally learn to surf! In the end, it taught me a valuable lesson on the balancing of work and life.” This month, van Oijen is moving to Austra­lia to work at University of Wollongong in the School of Chemistry.

In addition to his passion for biophysics, van Oijen enjoys flying, having recently earned his pilot’s li­cense. “It’s a wonderful mix of, on the one hand, the romanticism of being free and on the other, the very steep but satisfying learning curve one has to climb to master the complex set of skills needed to fly a plane and find your way through the skies,” he explains. Another of his passions is astrophotogra­phy, a hobby van Oijen first undertook as a child. “I picked [it] up again a few years ago. I spend too many nights outside with my telescope and CCD camera to take pictures of the night sky.” His col­league Karl Duderstadt is thankful that van Oijen chose a career in biophysics rather than pursuing these other passions full time. “His childhood dream was to be an astronaut. Fortunately for us,” Duderstadt says, “he became a physics professor and has remained satisfied flying planes in the sky over the Netherlands.”