Dirk Aarts studied chemistry at the University of Utrecht, and completed his PhD in 2005 at the Van’t Hoff Laboratory for Physical and Colloidal Chemistry under the supervision of Prof Henk Lekkerkerker. He subsequently moved to the Ecole Normale Supérieure as a Marie Curie Fellow, joining the group of Professor. Daniel Bonn.
In 2007 he took up a lecturership at the Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory of the University of Oxford, combined with a Studentship at Christ Church. He was made full professor in 2013. From 2015-2018 he coordinator the European Innovative Training Network (ITN-ETN) called ‘DiStruc’, coordinating 5 academic and 4 industrial nodes, with 15 PhD students in total. He has won a number of prizes and awards, including the Andries Miedema prize, the IOP Liquids and Complex Fluids Group Young Scientist Award, and the Martinus van Marum award from the Royal Holland Society of Sciences. He has currently taken up an administrative role in Christ Church.
