Sjoerd did his PhD in Nijmegen on a theoretical topic in liquid crystal physics. After finishing his PhD in 1995 he joined Philips Research in Eindhoven, where he worked on a variety of topics, a.o. polarization optics of LCDs, optical design for Blu-ray Disc data storage, and automated microscopy for digital pathology applications. After 13 years he left Philips for academia and started at Delft University of Technology. He is now full professor and is currently also head of the department of Imaging Physics. His research is in the field of computational imaging, and primarily focuses on super-resolution microscopy, in which he tries to advance both optical engineering and algorithms for image analysis and reconstruction, with the ultimate goal to achieve an isotropic resolving power on the nanometer scale.