Raf de Bont holds the chair History of Science and the Environment at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Since 2021, he chairs the History Department.

De Bont studied History at the University of Leuven and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2005, he took his doctoral degree with a thesis on the reception(s) of evolution theory in Belgium. Before coming to Maastricht, he has been a postdoc at the University of Leuven and a visiting fellow at Cambridge University and Imperial College London.