Jan van der Greef is Professor of Analytical Biosciences at Leiden University within the Leiden/Amsterdam Center for Drug Research (LACDR). In addition he is scientific director of TNO’s Systems Biology & Personal Health research within TNO Quality of Life, a program with special emphasis on the synergy between pharma and food research. He is als co-founder of SU BioMedicine a spin-off company of TNO, based on an innovative scientific concept developed for personalized diagnosis and herbal medicine.
His current research interest is the development of Systems Biology as a way to scientifically bridge different health care concepts. In a prior responsibility as managing director of TNO Pharma, he has successfully developed this innovative business organization to become a internationally respected organization for drug discovery and drug development. He is also director of the Sino-Dutch center for preventive and personalized medicine, an initiative between CAS, MOST , Netherlands Genomics Initiative and TNO. He is a co-founder and member of the scientific advisory board of BG Medicine , the first Systems Biology company and developed the concept of Systems Biology for Pharmaceutical industry and Life Sciences. He is also a scientific co-founder of the Leiden university spin-off company Kiadis based on novel high resolution screening platforms for natural products. His PhD was completed at the University of Amsterdam in the field of mass spectrometry in 1980. He has published over 300 papers in international journals, supervised more than 22 PhD thesis projects and has given opening, plenary and keynote lectures (> 250) at major life sciences, analytical and pharmaceutical based conferences. He is co-inventor of several patents in Life Sciences and TCM related-technologies.
He is considered as a pioneer in the field of liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (LCMS, 1981), initiator of the field of  metabolomics (1982) in the biomedical domain , among the first to develop single cell profiling by mass spectrometry and initiator of the field of Systems Biology in Medicine (1999) also applied in Traditional Chinese Medicine (2002). He is member of editorial and scientific boards of journals , societies etc. He is chairman of the LC/MS Montreux conferences. He has been co-organizer of 9 different international meetings and has been member on various scientific boards of international research organizations.
He received an award for major contributions in drug analysis by the Belgium Society of Pharmaceutical sciences in 1998. He became doctor honoris causa at Ghent University in 2000 and received an AAPS award as one of the authors of the best analytical paper in 2002. He was chosen as Lilly distinguished lecturer in the area of Analytical Chemistry in 2004 and granted the prestigious Scheele award by the Swedish Academy for Pharmaceutical Sciences in 2005. He also received a honorary professorship from the Chinese Academy of Sciences at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics and visiting professorship from the Chinese Academy of Engineering at the Jia Tong university in Shanghai in 2005.