Gustaaf Hallegraeff BSc, MSc, PhD, DSc

Gustaaf was born in 1949 in the Netherlands. A childhood gift of a toy microscope got him interested in microscopic plankton at an early age, his compatriot Anton van Leeuwenhoek became his all-time hero and he enrolled at the University of Amsterdam at age 17 with the single-minded purpose to study plankton.

He was awarded a PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 1976 for a thesis on Pigment diversity, Biomass and Species Diversity of Phytoplankton of three Dutch lakes. When later in life joining the University of Tasmania in Australia he was awarded a D.Sc. degree from that institution in 2002.