After earning his MA in 1998 and PhD in 2002 in Mathematics at Eindhoven, Jan Draisma was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Basel from 2002-2005. Afterwards he returned to Eindhoven as assistant professor until 2011; he currently holds an associate professorship there. In 2010 he was awarded a Vidi grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research for his research on highly symmetric infinite-dimensional varieties. Draisma currently serves as chair of the SIAM activity group in algebraic geometry and as executive committee chair for MEGA 2015. He has broad interests in algebraic geometry, Lie theory, combinatorics and their applications.