Dr Jano van Hemert has a PhD in Mathematics and Physical Sciences from the Leiden University, The Netherlands (2002). Since 2007, he is a Research Fellow 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 of the UK's National e-Science Centre.

He has held research positions at the Leiden University (NL), the Vienna University of Technology (AT) 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. In 2009, he was recognised as a young research leader with a Scottish Crucicible. All of his projects are interdisciplinary collaborations and many of his research projects have included partners from industry.

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