Jan-Willem Veening obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and received postdoctoral training at the Centre for Bacterial Cell Biology, Newcastle University, UK. In 2009, he established his own research and teaching group in the Groningen Biomolecular Sciences and Biotechnology Institute at the University of Groningen. In 2016 he moved to the University of Lausanne as full professor at the Department of Fundamental Microbiology as head of the Laboratory of Systems and Synthetic Microbiology. The Veening lab uses systems and synthetic biology approaches to study chromosome segregation, mechanisms of antibiotic resistance development, and noise in gene expression in the important opportunistic human pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae. Veening received several large grants (e.g. Veni, Vidi, ERC StG, ERC CoG), became EMBO Young Investigator in 2014 and joined the Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015.