Wilfred A. van der Donk was born in the Netherlands and received his B.S. and M.S. from Leiden University. He moved to the USA in 1989 to pursue his Ph.D. in chemistry at Rice University with Kevin Burgess. After postdoctoral work at MIT in the lab of JoAnne Stubbe, he joined the faculty at the University of Illinois in 1997, where he currently holds the Richard E. Heckert Chair in Chemistry. Since 2008, he has been an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. 

Research in his laboratory uses chemistry, enzymology, and molecular biology to better understand enzyme catalysis and to use that knowledge for synthetic biology. He has co-authored more than 300 publications and is a recipient of an ACS Cope Scholar Award (2006), the Emil Thomas Kaiser Award of the Protein Society (2013), and the Vincent du Vigneaud Award of the American Peptide Society (2017). He is a member of the American Academy of Microbiology, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.