René Bernards received his Ph.D. in 1984 from the University of Leiden. He joined the laboratory of Robert Weinberg at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, USA for his postdoctoral training. Here, he studied the function of both oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes. He continued this work when he joined the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center as an assistant professor in 1988. In 1992 he was appointed senior staff scientist at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. In 1994 he was appointed part time professor of molecular carcinogenesis at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. In the last decade, his laboratory has focused on the development of new tools to carry out genome-wide functional genetic screens to identify novel biomarkers of response to cancer drugs. In July of 2003 he co-founded “Agendia”, a genomics-based diagnostic company that started offering the first microarray-based diagnostic test for the clinical management of breast cancer in 2004. He received several awards for his research, including the Pezcoller Foundation-FECS Recognition for Contribution to Oncology, the Ernst W. Bertner Award for Cancer Research from the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, the ESMO Lifetime Achievement Award in Translational Research in Breast Cancer and the Spinoza award from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.