As of September 1, 2020, Jan de Boer is a member of the Executive Board and chairman of the NWO Domain Exact and Natural Sciences. During the transition of NWO, Jan de Boer played a role in setting up the domain Exact and Natural Sciences and became a member of the domain board in 2017.

Jan de Boer is a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Amsterdam. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Utrecht in 1993 and subsequently worked as a postdoc in the United States. After this period he returns to the Netherlands and has been working at the University of Amsterdam ever since. He was involved in various broad research initiatives such as GRAPPA, Delta ITP, and DIEP. In 2015 he became a member of the Executive Board of the FOM foundation, which on 1 January 2017 was transformed into NWO-I, the Institutes Organization of NWO.