Lodewyk Wessels received his M.Sc.(1990) and Ph.D.(1997) both from the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Universtity of Pretoria, South Africa. From 1993 to 1997 he was a member of the Center for Spoken Language Understanding at the Oregon Graduate School of Science and Technology, initially as graduate student and later as post-doctoral fellow. In 1997 he joined the Faculty of electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science at the Delft University of Technology, initially as postdoc and later as assistant professor. In 1997 he became a faculty member and head of the Bioinformatics and Statistics group at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He still holds a position as adjunct assistant professor in bioinformatics at the Delft University of Technology.