Philippe Bastiaens received his PhD in biochemistry in 1992 from Wageningen University followed by his postdoctoral training at Wageningen University and the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Gottingen. In 1997 he became head of his own research group in the field of cell biophysics at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London and in 2000 became group leader of the cell biology and biophysics programme at the EMBL in Heidelberg. In 2006 Philippe Bastiaens became director of the Department of Systemic Cell Biology at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology and full professor in cell biology and biochemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the Technische Universitat Dortmund.
 
Philippe Bastiaens has worked at the forefront of uncovering signal transduction downstream of receptor tyrosine kinases. He was one of the first to implement advanced microscopy approaches to uncover protein-protein interactions at the receptor level. Using advanced microscopy approaches he now integrates functional imaging data with mathematical modelling to better understand Ras signaling downstream from receptor activation. His work exemplifies how the integration of the fields of cell biology, microscopy and mathematical modelling can uncover the mechanistic basis of dynamics of cell signaling.