Dr Jano van Hemert has a PhD in Mathematics and Physical Sciences from the Leiden University (2002), The Netherlands. He is a Research Associate in the School of Informatics of the University of Edinburgh and a visiting researcher at the Human Genetics Unit in Edinburgh of the United Kingdom's Medical Research Council. He is responsible for leading the research within the UK's National e-Science Centre.

He has held research positions at the Leiden University (NL), the Vienna University of Technology (AUT) and the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science (NL). In 2004, he was awarded the talented young researcher fellowship by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. Many of his research projects have included partners from industry.

His research output includes over fifty published papers and software on optimisation, constraint satisfaction, evolutionary computation, data mining, scheduling, problem difficulty, dynamic routing, adaptive methods, Grid computing, and e-Science applications.