Jan Buitelaar is a professor of psychiatry and child and adolescent psychiatry at the Radboud University Medical Centre, and at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He has a strong clinical and research interest in neuropsychiatric disorders as ADHD, autism and impulsivity and aggression related disorders, and is involved in pharmacological, cognitive, clinical, genetic, and neuroimaging studies in these disorders. His current active research is focused on translational studies aiming to identify new molecular targets for ADHD and autism through matching preclinical models to human imaging genetics studies. His research is supported by numerous grants from the European Union, NIH, and from the Dutch Medical Research Council. He has published more than 1000 peer-reviewed scientific papers with more than 50,000 citations and is among the top 1% of most often cited researchers worldwide.

He has been awarded several honours, such as the research price of the Dutch Society of Psychiatry in 2011, the international travelling speaker fellowship 2011/2012 of the Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health, the Merz Guest Professorship at Goethe University in Frankfurt in 2014, the Oeuvre Award of European Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry ESCAP in 2019, and the Lifetime Achievement Award of European Network for Hyperkinetic Disorder Eunethydis in 2022. He is vice-president of the ADHD World Federation, treasurer of Eunethydis, and a fellow of INSAR (International Society for Autism Research). He has been knighted in the order of the Dutch Lion.