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After studying Plant Pathology at Wageningen University in the Netherland, Bart Thomma received a PhD from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium on immune signalling pathways in Arabidopsis for a thesis describing that, besides salicylic acid, also jasmonate and ethylene play major roles in defence against pathogens.

From 2003 onwards he has established a career at Wageningen University in The Netherlands, starting as postdoc, through assistant and associate professor to become full professor and head of department in 2013. This is where he started to develop his work on the vascular wilt pathogen Verticillium dahliae.

In 2020, Bart Thomma was awarded a Humboldt professorship to become professor of Evolutionary Microbiology at the University of Cologne in Germany and at the “Centre of Excellence on Plant Science” (CEPLAS), where he moved his research group. Bart Thomma received the first RKS Wood Prize, awarded by the British Society for Plant Pathology, and acts as section editor for the journal PLoS Pathogens and as co-editor-in-chief of FEMS Microbiology Reviews.