Bas van Ravensteijn started his scientific career at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), where he studied Chemical Engineering (2006 – 2011) with a Master in Organic and Polymer Chemistry. After obtaining his M.Sc. degree he moved to the Van `t Hoff Laboratory for Physical & Colloid Chemistry at Utrecht University (UU) to perform his Ph.D. research under supervision of Prof. Willem Kegel (2011 – 2015). This dissertation focussed on the synthesis and self-assembly of complex colloidal particles. 

His postdoctoral life started at the University of California – Santa Barbara (UCSB). Being part of the Materials Research Laboratory and the Mitsubishi Center for Advanced Materials and in close collaboration with Prof. Craig Hawker and Prof. Matthew Helgeson, he developed new synthetic tools for the efficient preparation of well-defined branched polymer architectures and investigated their application as multi-functional lubricant additives.

In 2019, he returned to the Netherlands to join the Materials Solutions Department of the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO). Here, he mainly worked on composite materials for thermo-chemical heat storage applications.

In 2020, he transitioned back to academia with the financial help of an individual Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellowship. Working in the group of Prof. Ilja Voets and the Institute for Complex Materials (ICMS) at the TU/e, he used controlled radical polymerizations to steer the assembly of colloidal particles into out-of-equilibrium superstructures.

He joined the Department of Pharmaceutics in 2021 to set up his own research lines in which the worlds of polymer and physical chemistry and pharmaceutical sciences are brought together in pursuit of more robust and effective nanomedicines.