Paul van Zuijlen is medical director of the Burn Center of the Red Cross Hospital, Beverwijk, The Netherlands. He is Endowed Professor for Burn Injury Management at the Amsterdam UMC, The Netherlands. He studied medicine at the University of Amsterdam and graduated in 1995. He earned his PhD in 2002 on tissue engineered skin and scar assessment tools. Meanwhile he was trained as a Plastic Surgeon at the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam and the Red Cross Hospital in Beverwijk. He visited many leading burn centers around the world during a fellowship on burn treatment and reconstructive surgery.

His research interests are in tissue engineering, complexity sciences and innovations in reconstructive burn surgery. He supervises projects on translational system biology and tissue engineering for reconstructive surgery of the human skin and facial cartilage. He has a keen interest in exploring the collagen architecture and vascularisation of human skin and scar tissue by novel techniques and supervises clinical studies on techniques to improve the outcome of reconstructive surgery such as the use of perforator-based flaps, skin stretching and fat grafting. He is developer of a tool that is nowadays used worldwide to measure the quality of scar tissue (the POSAS, the Patient and Observer Scar Assessment Scale).

He has been member of the board of the International Society for Burn Injuries (2012-2016) and the ISBI guideline committee.