Academic staff of Utrecht University

Jan Theodoor Gerard Overbeek (Groningen, January 30, 1911 – February 19, 2007) was a Dutch professor of physical chemistry at the Utrecht University.

Jean Abraham Chrétien Oudemans (Amsterdam, 16 December 1827 – Utrecht, 14 December 1906) was a Dutch astronomer. He was the director of the Utrecht Observatory from 1875 until 1898, when he retired.
Oudemans was born in Amsterdam, son of the poet, teacher and philologist Anthonie Oudemans Sr. and Jacoba Adriana Hammecker. He entered Leiden University when he was just 16 as a student of the noted astronomer Frederik Kaiser. He became a high school teacher in Leiden when he was just 19 (1846). The next six years he worked on his dissertation on the determination of the latitude of Leiden. Next he studied asteroids and variable stars, meanwhile hoping for an academic appointment. In 1855 he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He married Pauline Adriana Verdam (the daughter of a well-known mathematics professor Gideon Jan Verdam ) in 1856. In the same year he was appointed a professor at Utrecht University and became the first director of its observatory. However, his interest drew him towards geography. He traveled to the Dutch East Indies as head surveyor, and worked in that capacity for 18 years, publishing his works on the triangulation of the island of Java in six books.In 1874 he organized an astronomical expedition to the island of Réunion to observe the transit of Venus but, due to bad weather, the results were disappointing.Oudemans crater on Mars was named in his honor.
A brother was the botanist Corneille Antoine Jean Abram Oudemans. One of his sons was Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans Jzn, one of the fathers of cryptozoology.

Rudolf Magnus (2 September 1873, Brunswick – 25 July 1927, Pontresina) was a German pharmacologist and physiologist. He studied medicine, specialising in pharmacology, in Heidelberg, where he became associate professor of pharmacology in 1904. In 1908 he became the first professor of pharmacology in Utrecht, where he spent the rest of his working life.
Had he lived, he likely would have been awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on animal reflexes. The authors of Nobel, the Man and his Prizes by H.Schück et al., edited by the Nobel Foundation (2nd ed. Amsterdam, 1962, p. 311) wrote of Magnus and his co-worker De Kleyn: ‘The examiner [1927] declared that the work done by Magnus and De Kleyn clearly deserved a prize, and the prospects for an award seemed most favourable when Magnus unexpectedly died.’ For his life and work see, Rudolf Magnus, Physiologist and Pharmacologist: A Biography (2002, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) by his son, Dr.Otto Magnus.
Magnus had five children, Karl (1903-1989) lung specialist; Margarete (Gretl)(1905-1968)who worked as his secretary and translator; Dorothea who died aged 11; Erica (1909-1991) architect; and Otto (1913-2014) neurologist.
Magnus is most widely known for his work as a physiologist. His book Körperstellung ("Posture")., a study of functional neurology, is his best known work.

Petrus Johannes Waardenburg (3 June 1886 – 23 September 1979) was a Dutch ophthalmologist, geneticist, and pioneer in the application of genetics to ophthalmology. Waardenburg syndrome is named after him.

Friedrich August Ferdinand Christian Went (June 18, 1863 – July 24, 1935) was a Dutch botanist.
Went was born in Amsterdam. He was professor of botany and director of the Botanical Garden at the University of Utrecht. His eldest son was the Dutch botanist Frits Warmolt Went, who in 1927 as a graduate student worked on plant hormones, specifically the role of auxin in phototropism.
He became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1898.Went died, aged 72, in Wassenaar.

Ambrosius Arnold Willem Hubrecht (2 March 1853, in Rotterdam – 21 March 1915, in Utrecht) was a Dutch zoologist.
Hubrecht studied zoology at Utrecht University with Harting and Donders, for periods joining Selenka in Leiden and later Erlangen, and Gegenbauer in Heidelberg. He graduated magna cum laude with Harting in 1874 with a study on nemertine worms. In 1875–1882 he worked at the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie in Leiden, where he was the curator of ichthyology and herpetology, and in 1882 became professor at Utrecht. In 1890–1891 he traveled in Java, Sumatra, and Borneo, where he made embryological studies, notably on the tarsier. He visited the United States in 1896 and 1907. Honorary degrees were conferred on him by Princeton University, the University of St Andrews, the University of Dublin, the University of Glasgow (LL.D 1901), and the University of Giessen.
Hubrecht´s most important work was in embryology and placentation of the mammals. In papers in the Quarterly Journal of Microscopial Science in 1883 and 1887 he put forth the theory—also held by Sir E. Ray Lankester—that the vertebrates originated in a Nemertine form, basing this on his discovery in the Nemertines of a continuous nerve sheath. The Descent of the Primates (1897) is the title under which were published his lectures at the sesquicentennial celebration at Princeton.
In 1883 he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Hubrecht founded the Institut Internationale d'Embryologie, today known as the International Society of Developmental Biologists.

Ernst Julius Cohen ForMemRS (7 March 1869 – 6 March 1944) was a Dutch Jewish chemist known for his work on the allotropy of metals. Cohen studied chemistry under Svante Arrhenius in Stockholm, Henri Moissan at Paris, and Jacobus van't Hoff at Amsterdam. In 1893 he became Van't Hoff's assistant and in 1902 he became professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Utrecht, a position which he held until his retirement in 1939. Throughout his life, Cohen studied the allotropy of tin.
Cohen's areas of research included polymorphism of both elements and compounds, photographic chemistry, electrochemistry, pizeochemistry, and the history of science. He published more than 400 papers and numerous books.In 1913 he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1926. Following the 29 April 1942 decree that Dutch Jews wear the yellow badge, he was arrested by Nazi police for non-compliance and forced to resign.According to Margit Szöllösi-Janze, in her book, Science in the Third Reich, Cohen "put great efforts into restoring the relationships of Western European scientists with their German colleagues after the First World War."
He was killed on 6 March 1944 in a gas chamber at Auschwitz concentration camp.

Julius Wolff (18 April 1882 – 8 February 1945) was a Dutch-Jewish mathematician, known for the Denjoy–Wolff theorem and for his boundary version of the Schwarz lemma. With his family he was arrested in Utrecht by the Nazi occupation forces of the Netherlands on 8 March 1943 and transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 13 September 1944, where he died of epidemic typhus on 8 February 1945, shortly before the camp was liberated.Wolff studied mathematics and physics at the University of Amsterdam, where he earned his doctorate in 1908 under Korteweg with thesis Dynamen, beschouwd als duale vectoren. From 1907 to 1917 he taught at secondary and grammar schools in Meppel, Middelburg, and Amsterdam. In 1917 Wolff was appointed Professor of differential calculus, theory of functions and higher algebra at the University of Groningen and in 1922 at the University of Utrecht. He was also a statistical advisor for the life insurance company (or co-operative distributive society) "Eigen Hulp," (a predecessor of AEGON) with offices at The Hague.

Jacob van der Hoeden (Hebrew: יעקב ואן דר הודן, 27 July 1891 in Utrecht – 1 February 1968) was a Dutch-born Israeli veterinary research scientist.

Marcel Gilles Jozef Minnaert (12 February 1893 – 26 October 1970) was a Belgian-Dutch astronomer. He was born in Bruges and died in Utrecht. He is notable for his contributions to astronomy and physics and for a popular book on meteorological optics: Light and colour in the open air, first published in English in 1940.