text: Berend (Bert) Poolman is a Dutch biochemist,  as specialist in bioenergetics of microorganisms and membrane transport. He is a professor of Biochemistry at the University of Groningen and an elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) since 2009. Poolman is a pioneer in the  field of bottom-up synthetic biology, that is, the construction from molecular building blocks of functional metabolic networks and autonomously operating functional systems, which are typical of living cells. Poolman is a lecturer in membrane biology and synthetic biology.