Biography
Jacobus J. (Koos) Boomsma read biology at the Free University of Amsterdam and obtained his PhD in 1982. After a 3-years postdoctoral research position at the same university he received a 5-year C. & C. Huygens Fellowship from the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO) to continue research on the evolutionary biology of ants, with Utrecht University as home base and stays at the Department of Zoology in Oxford, UK and the Department of Entomology, Cornell University, USA. He became a tenured Associate Professor at Aarhus University in Denmark in 1990 and a full Professor at the University of Copenhagen in 1999. He coordinated two EU Marie Curie Research Training Networks and he initiated and directed the Copenhagen Centre for Social Evolution since 2005. The Centre’s research focuses on the evolutionary biology and ecology of social insects and their parasitic and mutualistic symbionts, and increasingly uses molecular and genomic techniques for testing evolutionary hypotheses about cooperation and conflict. He also started an evolutionary medicine program using the extensive public health data of Denmark to test evolutionary conflict hypotheses on why humans are vulnerable to pregnancy and mental disorders.