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Henk Hoekstra is a professor at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. His main area of research is observational cosmology, with a particular focus on the study of dark matter and dark energy using weak gravitational lensing. Since 2011 he is a cosmology coordinator for Euclid, the ESA mission to study the nature of dark energy and many other aspects of our current cosmological paradigm.

After completing his PhD (cum laude) at the University of Groningen in 2000, he moved to Canada, initially as a postdoctoral fellow at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto. In 2004 he moved to the University of Victoria as an assistant professor and a scholar of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. In 2007 Henk Hoekstra was awarded a prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. He returned to his native country in 2008 to join the faculty of Leiden Observatory. In this year he was awarded a Vidi grant by the Dutch funding agency NWO and a Marie Curie international reintegration grant from the European Union. In 2011 he received a starting grant from the European Research Council to fund his research on the KiloDegree Survey and to advance the accuracy of weak lensing measurements. The next step, in preparation for the launch of Euclid, is to advance shape measurement algorithms and measure intrinsic alignments. The latter makes use of data from the PAUCam Survey and this research is supported thanks to a NWO Vici grant awarded in 2016. As of August 2017 he is a full professor in observational cosmology.