Dick Swaab - BiographyCurriculum Vitae#

Dick Swaab (born 1944) studied medicine and was Director of the Netherlands Institute for Brain Research from 1978 to 2005. Since 1979 he is Professor of Neurobiology at the Medical Faculty, University of Amsterdam. In 1985 he founded the Netherlands Brain Bank and was Director until 2005. He is since 1978 Leader Research Team Neuropsychiatric Disorders, Neth. Inst. for Neuroscience, an Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), and is appointed Qiu Shi (= Pursuing the truth) Professor in Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, P.R. China, where he is involved in setting up a network of Brain Banks in China and giving a course on Brain and Society.

His major research interests focus on sexual differentiation of the human brain in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation, aging of the brain and Alzheimer’s disease and the neurobiological basis of depression and suicide. He has published over 650 papers in SCI journals, authored more than 200 chapters in books, and edited more than 120 books. Swaab mentored 87 PhD students from which 20 are now full professors. He is author of the 2-volume monograph The Human Hypothalamus that appeared in 2003/4 in the Handbook of Clinical Neurology series, Elsevier and senior editor of 4 volumes on the Human hypothalamus in the Handbook of Clinical Neurology series in 2021.

Swaab published for the general public the Dutch best seller We are our Brains, that sold more than 450.000 copies in the Netherlands and is translated in 18 languages. This book has been more than 2 years in the Dutch bestseller list, 7 weeks even as #1. There is also a children’s version of the book (You are your brains). In 2016 Swaab published a second book for the general public Our Creative Brains, that also came from the first week in the bestseller list.

Swaabs’ H-factor is 112.