Dr. Johan W. E. Jocken graduated cum laude from the University of Hasselt, Belgium with a Master in Medical Science and Molecular Biology. He did his doctorate at Maastricht University, The Netherlands under the supervision of Prof. dr. Wim Saris and Prof. dr. Ellen Blaak and received his PhD degree from the Department of Human Biology in 2008 for his thesis entitled: The Lipolytic Pathway in the Obese Insulin Resistant State. In 2008 he joined the Lipid Laboratory research group of Prof. dr. Peter Arner rand Prof. dr. Mikael Ryden at the Department of Medicine of Karolinska Institute in Huddinge, Stockholm, Sweden as a postdoctoral researcher funded by a Rubicon grant from The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific research (NWO). Since 2015, he is appointed as Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences of Maastricht University.

He is particularly interested in unravelling the molecular mechanism behind an impaired adipose tissue (and skeletal muscle) function in human metabolic diseases (including obesity and type 2 diabetes) and has a long-term expertise in the development and implementation of state-of-the-art in vitro molecular biological techniques with in vivo nutritional and integrative metabolic human clinical research. He has supervised several national and international PhD theses and has over 70 scientific publications (based on citation report, Web of Science). For his scientific work he received research grants amongst others from ZonMw NWO (Rubicon and Veni), Dutch Diabetes Research Foundation (DFN), and European Foundation for the Study of Diabetes (EFSD), and was awarded the European Association for the Study of Obesity (EASO) New Investigators United Best Thesis Award (2009) and Young Investigators Award in basic Science (2014).