Govert Somsen is full professor of Biomolecular Analysis/Analytical Chemistry at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He obtained his doctorate in Amsterdam, and subsequently was assistant and associate professor at the University of Groningen and Utrecht University in The Netherlands. His main expertise is on hyphenated concepts in separation science directed to the characterization of (bio)polymers and (bio)active compounds. His group made significant contributions to the development, optimization and application of coupled analytical techniques combining selective liquid-phase separations with mass spectrometry, optical spectroscopy and bioactivity assays. He is (co-)author of over 200 papers in these fields, and editor of Journal of Chromatography B.