Henk Noorman was trained as a chemical engineer (Groningen University) and got a PhD in Biotechnology from Delft University of Technology. He then worked as a post-doc in a Nordic consortium, on computation and scale-up of fermentation. Since 1994 he works at Gist-brocades/DSM as a scientist, currently as corporate science fellow for engineering sciences. Next to that he is an honorary professor at TUDelft in bioprocess design and integration.