Professor Leo Kouwenhoven has led the FOM focus group 'Solid State Quantum Information Processes' since 2004 and is well known for his publications about the Majorana fermions. He works at Delft University of Technology where he also gained his degree in 1988 and his PhD cum laude in 1992. After his PhD he was a postdoc at the University of California at Berkeley for one year. He then returned to Delft as an Academy Researcher at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1998 he became a Professor of Physics. Kouwenhoven was also visiting Professor at the Physics Department of Harvard University for one year and in 2007 he received the NWO Spinoza Prize, the highest award in Dutch science.