"I started with a short-term project and never left"

On 1 October, Wim van der Putten took over the directorship from predecessor Geert de Snoo. For the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) he is a familiar face. Van der Putten started at the 'IOO' back in 1984. He shares stories about his career so far, and his work as interim director.

Begin at the beginning

"The easiest to start with is what my career has looked like until now. To be brief, I started with a short-term project and never left NIOO." Van der Putten started in 1984 as a young researcher at the Institute for Ecological Research (IOO), one of NIOO's precursors. He was hired for a short-term project. "At that time, the director of the institute called a professor to have a few students to come by as candidate researchers and carry out a research project. My project was about the restoration of marram grass on seawall dunes. This was a practical problem, because the grass did not want to grow. And in no time I had developed a new planting method, and we had discovered that marram grass suffers from soil diseases."

From naked eggs to helophyte filters

At the end of that first research project, Van der Putten got a rare opportunity: "Before the project ended, I was writing a new project proposal myself. I had managed to extend my own project and together with colleagues I wrote a PhD research project, which I supervised before I myself had been awarded a PhD. The director, Jan Woldendorp, saw that I easily brought in projects. He gave me an appointment as coordinator for application research. That was not at all common back then. The idea was that I would develop ideas for application research together with the more fundamental researchers and that I would do the acquisition of those projects. For example, I then secured a project for the predecessor of the Department of Animal Ecology on the reduced egg shell quality of great tits due to acid rain. With the then Department of Plant Population Biology I did a project on risk analysis of genetically modified organisms, and with the predecessor of Microbial Ecology I worked on helophyte filters to purify water. I immensely enjoyed talking to people who were a bit further away, where it wasn't obvious that we would work together, and then seeing how you manage to bridge the differences."

"Why shouldn't I get my PhD?"

So Van der Putten supervised a PhD student before he even got his own PhD. "I thought, hey, everyone is doing a PhD, why shouldn't I? So then I wrote my project proposal and found a supervisor from the university of Wageningen. Back then, we didn't have professors at the institute." Here, too, Van der Putten did not follow the usual path: "I received excellent guidance from senior researchers, but they also gave me a lot of space and freedom to make my own choices. And all in the context of an applied project: if you made sure the clients were satisfied, you were given that space."

Own department

Van der Putten continued to build his research career. Around 1992, three ecological institutes merged to form NIOO. "The then department of Soil Biology switched to research on Plant-Microorganism Interactions. Within that department I grew to senior researcher. When Louise Vet started as NIOO director, she wanted to link her above-ground research to the underground, what I was studying. She had me set up a new department in 2000: Multitrophic Interactions, the precursor to Terrestrial Ecology."

Building upon predecessors

There have been three directors since NIOO was founded - not counting the whole 70-year history. Van der Putten has worked with all three of them. "In 1992, the newly formed NIOO had very different research directions and groups. Wim van Viersen was the first director of the joint institute, which from then on was called NIOO. He made good strides in the discussion on applied versus basic research. ‘There are two types of research,’ he said, ‘good and bad research’. That has nothing to do with fundamental or applied."

"In late 1999 came Louise Vet. She would be the face of science with three centre directors supporting her. The three centres were Yerseke for the estuarine and marine research (which had a strong focus on ecosystem research), the limnological research in Nieuwersluis (where mainly community-level research took place), and the Centre for Terrestrial Ecology in Heteren (where mainly population-level research was done). Eventually, during Louise's directorship, the Nieuwersluis and Heteren moved to the current location in Wageningen, and shortly afterwards the (sea-oriented) research in Yerseke merged with the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ)."

"With Geert de Snoo, we had a director who got the whole institute together again and examined 'where do we stand now'. He started the discussion about what the mission and vision of the institute are, reduced the number of research themes from seven to three and also made a new strategic plan with us. In almost five years, also including the Covid years, Geert has taken the NIOO through a transition process, leading up to an excellent Peer Review in 2024."

An interview with Geert de Snoo can also be read, in which he looks back on his directorship and looks ahead to the future.

Bridging the gap

Due to the departure of Geert de Snoo to KNAW, Van der Putten started as NIOO's interim director in October 2024. A new director is expected to start in the course of 2025. It is important that NIOO's development continues as usual in the meantime. Van der Putten: "Now we are at the point of 'how do we continue'? As interim, I am forming a bridge between what Geert has left behind and what the new director will soon take on. In thinking about what was the most logical step to take, I arrived at the question of how to increase our impact. Impact is often seen as arranging an application, but impact making is much more than that. You can make impact in science, towards society, in application, and many other areas. How do we ensure that NIOO increases the impact in our field? By asking individual researchers this question, you can empower everyone. You then build that up to departments and to NIOO as a whole. By asking the impact question, you also get a better idea of where the best opportunities lie for individual researchers and which issues of biodiversity, climate change and sustainable use of land and water we can tackle at NIOO."

"I don't yet see my career as finished"

After a long career at NIOO, Van der Putten will celebrate his 67th birthday and retire in June 2025. He is not quite planning to leave ecology behind: "I don't see my career as finished yet," he says. Even if it is not really the end then, he does see this interim directorship as a conclusion to his activities in research management: "I enjoy doing this, but I must say that I wouldn't have wanted it any sooner either. It did surprise me how quickly I left the management of my department behind. To do that, it helped a lot that the department handled the sudden change very well. I greatly admire that and it made it easy for me to take this step. What I am also happy about, is that I can still help in thinking about the research questions. When, together with a team, you start to understand how something really works, it is very satisfying. What I like about my current job is that I get to know NIOO in a different way. I now also have very different contacts with other parts of the organisation and I am learning to see new opportunities to improve the work at NIOO further. In these nine months or so, I hope to be able to contribute something that will help NIOO to move forward, both in organisational and scientific terms." Whatever his life will look like after his retirement, the interim directorship is a nice farewell gift at NIOO.