Wim van den Brink (1952) received his medical degree in 1981 from the Free University in Amsterdam. After his training as a psychiatric epidemiologist in Groningen (1983-1986) and New York (1986-1987) he received his PhD degree form the State University of Groningen in 1989. Since 1992 he is full professor of Addiction Psychiatry at the Academic Medical Center of the University of Amsterdam. He is also the director of the Amsterdam Institute for Addiction Research (AIAR). In 2014 he received the life time achievement award for science from the Netherlands Association of Psychiatry and in 2015 he was granted the status of honorable member of the Spanish Society for Dual disorders.

In 2017 he received the European Addiction Research Award from the European Federation of Addiction Societies (EUFAS). He is a (co)author of more than 550 international peer reviewed scientific papers (HIWoS=70; HIGoogle Scholar=95). He has been a thesis advisor of 75 PhD students. Until recently, he was one of the chiefeditors of European Addiction Research. He has been the chair of the Workgroups that developed the Dutch Treatment Guidelines on Alcohol Use Disorders, Opiate Addiction and Drugs other than opioids. He is one of the founders and president of the International Collaboration of ADHD and Substance Abuse (ICASA). He was the chair of the Scientific Program Committee of European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP).

His main scientific interests are related to the neurobiology of substance use disorders and behavioral addictions, the pharmacological treatment of substance use disorders and related comorbidities, and the reduction of stigma regarding patients with an addiction.