Hans J. ten Donkelaar (1946) studied Medicine at the University of Nijmegen (The Netherlands), where he received his M.D. (1974) and Ph.D. (1975). In 1978, he was appointed Associate Professor of Neuroanatomy at the Department of Anatomy and Embryology of that University, where he taught Gross Anatomy and Neuroanatomy. His research interests are developmental and comparative aspects of motor systems, developmental disorders of the CNS and neurodegenerative diseases. With Rudolf Nieuwenhuys and Charles Nicholson he published The Central Nervous System of Vertebrates (1998, Springer) and with the late Anthony Lohman an anatomy and embryology textbook in Dutch, which is now in its fourth edition (ten Donkelaar HJ, Oostra R-J 2014 Klinische Anatomie en Embryologie. Springer Media/Houten/NL).
In 1998, he came to the Department of Neurology of the Radboud University Medical Centre in Nijmegen to do research on developmental and neurodegenerative diseases. In 2006, he published with Martin Lammens and Akira Hori Clinical Neuroembryology: Development and developmental disorders of the human central nervous system (Springer), which is in its second edition now (2014), and in 2011 Clinical Neuroanatomy: Brain circuitry and its disorders, which is no going into a second edition. Since 2012, he is Coordinator of the Working Group Neuroanatomy of the Federative International Programme for Anatomical Terminology (FIPAT) of the International Federation of Anatomical Associations (IFAA) and responsible for the Terminologia Neuroanatomica (TNA) published online February 23, 2017 (FIPAT.library.dal.ca/TNA). To promote the TNA, an illustrated version has been published with David Kachlík and R. Shane Tubbs as An Illustrated Terminologia Neuroanatomica: A concise encyclopedia of human neuroanatomy (ten Donkelaar HJ, Kachlík D, Tubbs RS; Springer, Heidelberg, 2018, Heidelberg).
Since 1970, he is married to Jirina Korfová, who workedfor a long time as anesthesiologist at the Rijnstate Hospital in Arnhem, the Netherlands. They have two children and four grandchildren and live partly in Doorwerth, The Netherlands, and partly in Prague, Czech Republic.