Professor van der Donk received his B.S. from Leiden University, the Netherlands, in 1989 and his Ph.D. from Rice University in 1994. He went on to do postdoctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and joined the faculty at Illinois in 1997. In 2008, he was appointed as an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Professor van der Donk's research interests are in organic chemistry and chemical biology. Especially in preparation of new antibiotics; synthetic and combinatorial chemistry; understanding enzymes involved in inflammation; enzyme engineering; design of new catalysts to clean-up polluted environments; mechanistic enzymology of metalloenzymes; antibiotic biosynthesis; genome mining for new natural products; synthesis of peptide conjugates