Maarten studied Applied Physics at the University of Technology in Delft. During his bachelor (BSc-degree in 2011) he was involved in several research projects in the group of Cees Dekker regarding the behaviour of DNA in solid-state nanopores. During his master studies (MSc-degree in 2013) he followed the Research & Development Specialisation and focussed his studies on Biophysics. Specifically, during his master thesis Maarten developed a novel fluorescent probe for Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy (STORM) in the lab of Elio Abbondanzieri, in the Bionanoscience department in Delft.
During a four-month internship at the University of Edinburgh, he then worked in the lab of Sander Granneman (Synthetic and Systems Biology Department) on a novel method to probe the secondary and tertiary structure of RNA molecules in yeast cells.

In January 2014, Maarten joined the Bram Koster Group in Leiden as a PhD-student on the STW-microscopy valley project regarding the integration of a high-resolution light microscope in a transmission electron microscope. He will be developing new methods and techniques for integrated correlative light and electron microscopy (CLEM), focussing on super-resolution light microscopy on cryosamples.