Bart Jan Ravoo (1970) obtained his graduate and postgraduate degrees from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. He graduated in physical organic chemistry in 1994 and obtained his PhD degree in 1998 under joint supervision of Prof. Jan Engberts and Dr. Wilke Weringa. His PhD thesis concerned vesicles of polymerizable lipids. During this period, he was a visiting student in Göttingen, Marseille and Haifa. He moved to University College Dublin, Ireland, in 1999 for a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Raphael Darcy. In the summer of 1999 he obtained the Schering-Plough Newman Scholarship in Organic Chemistry at University College Dublin for a period of three years. His work in Ireland centered on cyclodextrins as building blocks for supramolecular assembly. In 2002 he was appointed as assistant professor in the Laboratory of Supramolecular Chemistry and Technology (Director: Prof. David Reinhoudt) at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. His main research topics in Twente included self-assembly and molecular recognition in water and the development of functional self-assembled monolayers for nanoelectronics, soft lithography and nanofabrication. In 2007, he was appointed as professor at the University of Münster, Germany, where he is in charge of the "Synthesis of Nanoscale Systems" group. From 2012 until 2014 he served as Dean of the Department of Chemistry and Pharmacy and since 2016 he is co-director of the Center for Soft Nanoscience (SoN). Since 2021, he is spokesperson of the Collaborative Research Center (CRC 1459) "Intelligent Matter".