Jaco Verweij has a position as a parasitologist, molecular biologist, and staff member of the Department of Parasitology, Epidemiology & Diagnostics group at the Leiden University Medical Centre, the Netherlands. For almost 20 years, he has worked on the development, validation and implementation of new diagnostic tools, molecular methods in particular. He is co-author of over 50 peer-reviewed scientific publications and presents his work regularly at scientific conferences and meetings. Besides performing research, he supervises the parasitology diagnostics at the Clinical Microbiology Laboratory of the LUMC and provides teaching and training of national and international students in medical Parasitology and molecular diagnosis of parasitic infections during courses and (international) workshops. In 2007 he was in the organising committee of the 5th European Congress on Tropical Medicine and International Health in Amsterdam. He organised an Amoebiasis workshop in 2007 in Amsterdam and in 2009 he was in the organising committee of an amoebiasis EMBO workshop in Mexico. Since 2008 he is the secretary of the board of the Netherlands Society for Parasitology.