Wilfred van der Donk was born in the Netherlands and received his B.S. and M.S. from Leiden University working with Jan Reedijk. He moved to the USA in 1989 to pursue his Ph.D. in chemistry at Rice University with Kevin Burgess. After postdoctoral work at MIT with JoAnne Stubbe, he joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997, where he currently holds the Richard E. Heckert Chair in Chemistry. Since 2008, he is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Research in his laboratory uses chemistry, enzymology and molecular biology to better understand enzyme catalysis and to use that knowledge for synthetic biology. He has co-authored more than 300 publications and is a recipient of an ACS Cope Scholar Award (2006), the Jeremy Knowles Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2010), the Emil Thomas Kaiser Award of the Protein Society (2013), and the Vincent du Vigneaud Award of the American Peptide Society (2017). He is a member of the American Academy of Microbiology, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences (USA).