Klaas van Wijk is professor in the Section of Plant Biology within the School for Integrative Plant Science (SIPS). After completing his B.Sc. and M.Sc. at the Agricultural University Wageningen (Netherlands), he obtained a PhD in 1992 from the University of Groningen (The Netherlands), with part of his PhD work carried out at the Universities of Dusseldorf and Stockholm. This was then followed by postdocs at the Dept. of Biochemistry, Stockholm University (Sweden) and at the Carnegie Institute for Plant Biology at Stanford University (CA, USA). He then became assistant professor in 1997 at the Dept. of Biochemistry, Stockholm University and moved his lab in 2001 to the Section of Plant Biology in Cornell University. In 2011 he was promoted to full professor, he was associate chair of the Section from July-December 2017, and chair until July 2020.
He received the Melvin Calvin-Andrew Benson Award in 2004 from the International Society for Photosynthesis Research, and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award in 2012 to support his sabbatical visit to the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology in Golm (near Berlin, Germany). He served on the scientific advisory board of the Cluster of Excellence on Plant Sciences (CEPLAS) in Germany (2014-2018), and served on the editorial boards of the journals Molecular & Cellular Proteomics (2007-2017) and BMC Plant Biology (2006-2015), and since 2016 he is guest editor for The Plant Cell.
While at Cornell, van Wijk has given more than 110 invited seminars at conferences, workshops and institutions.