Elly M. Hol is trained as a medical biologist with a specialization in molecular neurobiology. After obtaining her PhD in Utrecht, she obtained a Max-Planck Fellowship to work for two years at the Max-Planck-Institute for Neurobiology in Martinsried, Germany. In 1997 she started as a post-doctoral fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Brain Research and she acquired substantial funding, including a fellowship of the Netherlands Brain Foundation, to work on the cellular quality control mechanisms in Alzheimer’s patients. She is currently heading the group “Astrocyte Biology & Neurodegeneration” at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, and she is appointed as a professor of biology of glia and neural stem cells at the SILS-Center for Neuroscience of the University of Amsterdam. The research in her group is focused on the cell and molecular biology of astrocytes and adult neural stem cells in health and disease. The ultimate goal of her research is to develop therapeutic strategies to stimulate the brain’s own repair capacity, e.g. by activating the adult neural stem cells in Parkinson’s disease or by controlling reactive gliosis in Alzheimer’s disease. She is a recipient of numerous research grants, including the prestigious 2008 NWO VICI-award (Innovational Research Incentives Scheme). Since 2010 she is chair of the COST-Action Nanonet, which stimulates European corporation and interaction in science and technology, in the field of intermediate filaments.