Mike Boxem studied medical biology at the VU University Amsterdam. He performed his graduate research at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, USA, and received his Ph.D. from Utrecht University in 2002. As a postdoctoral fellow he worked in the laboratory of Dr. Marc Vidal at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. In 2008, he started his own research group at the Department of Biology at Utrecht University, where he is now an Associate Professor in the division of Developmental Biology. He is the recipient of NWO Vidi (2010) and Vici (2017) grants, and is the coordinator of the Marie Curie ITN network ‘PolarNet’.