Gerard van der Geer (1950) studied mathematics at the University of Leiden. He received his PhD from that university in 1977. Subsequently he worked at the Sonderforschungsbereich at Bonn University and then got a position at the University of Amsterdam, where he has been full professor in Algebra since 1987. He spent long visits at research institutes like MSRI at Berkeley and the Max-Planck-Institut at Bonn, and foreign universities like Harvard, the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University.

Van der Geer has been managing editor of Compositio Mathematica for more than ten years and is editor of Geometriae Dedicata and of the EMS Monograph series. He is member of the scientific committees of the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Mathematik in Bonn and the Research Institute in Oberwolfach. He has successfully supervised seven PhD theses (including those of C. Faber and G. Farkas) and is currently supervising another three. He was one of the initiators of the big NWO projects “Moduli” and “Algebraic curves and Riemann surfaces”. He started the well-known series of Texel conferences.

Van der Geer has worked on Hilbert modular surfaces, on which he wrote the well-known volume “Hilbert Modular Surfaces” in the Ergebnisse series of Springer, on the Schottky problem, where he contributed with van Geemen a conjectural solution, on moduli of curves and abelian varieties, and on curves over finite fields. His current research deals with cohomology of local systems on moduli spaces and with moduli of Calabi-Yau varieties. He has published over 50 research papers in refereed journals.

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