Hidde Ploegh is a biochemist whose area of interest is the immune system. He is known for his analysis of the pathways involved in antigen presentation by products of the Major histocompatibility Complex (MHC). Ploegh was born in 1953 in the Netherlands, where he attended Groningen University. He performed the work for his PhD at Harvard University and obtained his degree from Leiden University in 1981. He took a position as a junior group leader in the Institute for Genetics at the University of Cologne, Germany and in 1984 moved back to the Netherlands where he worked at the Netherlands Cancer Institute to head the Division of Cellular Biochemistry. In 1992 he was recruited to the Center for Cancer Research as a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1997 he joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School as the director of its graduate program in immunology. In 2005 he joined the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2016 Ploegh joined Boston Children’s Hospital. Ploegh is a member of EMBO, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and a correspondent of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences.
