Conrad Louis Woldringh was born in 1940 in Djakarta (Indonesia). After two years of primary school in Switzerland, he finished school in Hilversum (the Netherlands), studied biology at the University of Amsterdam (MSc. 1968), and obtained his PhD at the Laboratory for Electron Microscopy in 1974. Apart from a short-term visit to Israel in 1974 and a sabbatical leave at the University of Texas at Austin in 1982, he remained associated with the University of Amsterdam, from where he retired in 2005. In cooperation with Prof. Th. Odijk (Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics University of Leiden), he is presently studying the physical molecular crowding forces that shape the bacterial nucleoid and that, in his view, set the conditions for the process of bacterial DNA segregation. The basis for these studies is formed by an image cytometric method they have developed to quantify the amount of DNA per individual nucleoid in fluorescence images of E. coli and to track the movement of fluorescently tagged DNA regions on the chromosome.