Hans Clevers obtained his MD degree in 1984 and his PhD degree in 1985 from the University Utrecht, the Netherlands. His postdoctoral work (1986-1989) was done with Cox Terhorst at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute of the Harvard University, Boston, USA.
From 1991-2002 Hans Clevers was Professor in Immunology at the University Utrecht and, since 2002, Professor in Molecular Genetics. From 2002-2012 he was director of the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht. From 2012-2015 he was President of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). From 2015 till 2019 he was Director Research of the Princess Máxima Center for pediatric oncology. Hans is a distinguished professor at Utrecht University, and is currently Head of pharma, Research and Early Development (pRED) and Member of the Enlarged Executive Committee at Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel, Switzerland. He is still actively involved in the research activities of his former research groups at the Hubrecht Institute (KNAW) and at the Princess Máxima Center as advisor / visiting researcher.
Throughout his career, he has worked on the role of Wnt signalling in stem cells and cancer. His discoveries include TCF as the nuclear Wnt effector, the role of Wnt in adult stem cell biology and of Wnt pathway mutations in colon cancer, Lgr5 as a marker of multiple novel types of adult stem cells and as receptor for the Wnt-amplifying R-spondins, and –finally- a method to grow ever-expanding mini-organs (‘organoids’) from Lgr5 stem cells derived from a range of healthy or diseased human tissues. This has led to over 780 peer-review publications and >160,000 citations (h-index 193).
Hans Clevers is member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000), of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2012) and the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (2014), the Academie des Sciences (2016) and the Orden pour le Merite der Wisschschaften und Kuenste (2017). He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Dutch Spinoza Award (2001), the Swiss Louis Jeantet Prize (2004), the German Meyenburg Cancer Research Award (2008), the German Ernst Jung-Preis für Medizin (2011), the French Association pour la Recherche sur le Cancer (ARC) Léopold Griffuel Prize, the Heineken Prize for Medicine (2012), the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2013), the ISSCR McEwen Award for Innovation and the Academy Professor Prize (2015), the Körber European Science Prize (2016), the Keio Medical Science Prize (2019) and the Ammodo Science Award for groundbreaking research (2022). He obtained three ERC Advanced Investigator grants (2008, 2016 and 2022), as well as funding from many other financing organizations including KWF, CRUK Grand Challenge grants, BSIK, NWO and ZonMw. He is Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur since 2005, Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion since 2012.