Martijn obtained his PhD in Chemical Engineering at Delft Technical University, Delft, the Netherlands, in 2004. His thesis, supervised by Dr. Stefan Bromley and Profs. Koos Jansen and Thomas Maschmeyer, focussed on the modelling of a range of siliceous materials, including zeolites and silica nanostructures.
After a brief stint as a postdoc in Delft, working on an industrially sponsored project for synthesizing zeolites nanoparticles, Martijn moved to London to work in the group of Dr. Rob Bell at the Davy Faraday Laboratory of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. His work there, funded through personal Marie Curie and Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, NWO, Talent fellowships, focussed on the screening of hypothetical zeolite frameworks and the study of chalcogenide porous materials.
In 2007, Martijn moved to Barcelona to work in the group of Prof. Francesc Illas at the University of Barcelona. His work there, funded through a personal Juan de la Cierva fellowship, focussed on crystal structure prediction of inorganic materials and the exploration of the energy landscape of inorganic nanostructures. He also started work on modelling the optical properties and photochemistry of inorganic nanostructures.
In 2010 Martijn received a Career Acceleration Fellowship from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and returned to London to work at University College London’s Chemistry Department. Here he started his own research group working primarily on modelling the photo- and electrochemistry of materials, photocatalysis and understanding the structures of self-assembled and polymeric materials. In 2012 he accepted a lectureship in the department and in 2016 was promoted to Reader (associate professor) and in 2020 to full professor.
Martijn has published more than 100 articles in international journals and co-edited a book on the computational modelling of inorganic nanomaterials. He also organised a number of international conferences and workshops, most recently a workshop on polymers as photocatalysts, and gave invited talks at a number of invited talks at (inter)national conferences. Finally, he is deputy chair of the Royal Society of Chemistry's Photophysics and Photochemistry Group committee and chair of the Dutch Academic Network in the UK.