Marco Roos received his university degree from the University of Amsterdam in 1995 in Molecular and Cellular Biology, with additional subjects in Computer Science. He obtained his PhD at the same university in 2001 at the department of Molecular Cytology, then headed by emeritus professor dr. Nanne Nanninga, on the movement of replicating DNA during the cell cycle of Escherichia coli . After receiving his PhD, he joined the Human Genetics department of the Academic Medical Centre (AMC), where he collaborated on the construction and analysis of a sequence-based human transcriptome map (Versteeg et al., Genome Research 2003). At the end of 2003 he joined the newly formed Integrative Bioinformatics Unit ( IBU) as a subproject leader (subject: data integration) to set up methodology research for the bioinformatics application of the Virtual Laboratory e-Science, a Dutch e-Science project, and three BioRange subprograms that IBU participates in. Methodologies investigated include a semantic web approach to data integration, a workflow approach for computational experiments, and an engineering approach to study complex systems. Recently, he has become more directly involved in applying and extending some of the e-science methodologies developed at IBU. The IBU is part of the Faculty of Science of the University of Amsterdam, where it emerged from the Microarray Department.

Marco's experience includes molecular biology methods, confocal and epifluorescent microscopy, digital image processing, statistical data analysis, integration of genomic data, and emerging e-science technology (workflow and semantic web). His work was mostly carried out in multi-disciplinary teams.