​Emiel Hensen received his PhD degree from Eindhoven University of Technology with Professor Rutger van Santen in 2000 on the topic of mechanism of heterogeneous catalysis. After a short stint with Berend Smit at the University of Amsterdam, he became an assistant professor at Eindhoven University of Technology. He was promoted to associate professor in 2008. From 2006-2008 he was a visiting research scientist at the Shell Research and Technology Center Amsterdam. Since 2009, he is full professor inorganic materials chemistry at Eindhoven University of Technology. He was a visiting professor at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) from 2001 until 2016, a visiting professor at Hokkaido University (Japan) in 2016 and foreign expert at Xiamen University and Jilin University (China). Hensen is the author of 365 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals (h-index 51), 2 patents, several articles in national journals and 10 book contributions. He obtained the prestigious Veni, Vidi and Vici grants as well as a TOP grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. Hensen is chairman of the Netherlands Research School for Catalysis (NIOK), member of the management team of the national gravitation program Multiscale Catalytic Energy Conversion (MCEC), board member of the European Research Institute of Catalysis (ERIC) and board member of the Chemelot InSciTe consortium. He is member of the Advanced Research Center Chemical Building Blocks Consortium. Since 2016, Hensen is Dean of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry of the Eindhoven University of Technology.

The research of Hensen focuses on the fundamental aspects of catalyzed reactions relevant to clean and sustainable processes for the production of fuels and chemicals with the aim to identify active sites and understand reaction mechanism. The working approach is to combine advanced characterization methods (synchrotron-based techniques such as X-ray absorption spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction as well as vibrational and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopies) with theoretical modeling (DFT, microkinetics) and performance testing (kinetics, high-throughput methods, transient techniques) to guide the design and synthesis of nanoscopically organized and well-defined chemically functionalized catalytic solid materials. Catalytic target reactions are methane activation, the Fischer-Tropsch reaction, conversion of biogenic molecules such as sugars and lignin, and metal-support cooperativity in selective oxidation.