Aad van der Vaart is a professor of stochastics at Leiden University and member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He studied mathematics and psychology at Leiden University and received a Ph.D. in mathematics at the same university. He held positions at universities in the United States and in Paris (France) and at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In 2015 he won the highest scientific award in the Netherlands, the NWO Spinoza Prize, for his groundbreaking research in statistics.