Ylstra received a bachelors in Physics in 1988 from the University of Amsterdam (UvA, NL) and commenced with a masters in Genetics at the Vrije Universiteit (VU, NL). In 1995 he received his PhD degree from the same university for work performed at the Universities of Vienna (A) and Nijmegen (NL), Plant Research International (NL) and The John Innes Institute (UK). He was awarded a 2-year NATO fellowship for his post-doctoral work at the University of California in Berkeley (USA) on genome-wide RNA screens . From 1998 he worked at the Comprehensive Cancer Center of the University of California, San Francisco (USA) and was involved in the development of DNA arrays for copy number analysis. In 2001 he accepted his current position at the VU University Medical Center, Cancer Center Amsterdam heading the Tumor Genome Analysis Core. The core has a strong genome laboratory and bioinformatics (pre-)processing track record, with an emphasis on DNA analysis from archival material, see more under http://www.tgac.nl.