Leo van Raamsdonk got his master at Utrecht University (the Netherlands) in 1980 in Biology (plant systematics, evolutionary biology, toxicology) and his PhD in 1984. From that year he is appointed as scientist at Wageningen University and Research Center, the Netherlands, and its predecessor institutes. The fields of research were until 1999 plant taxonomy of cultivated plants and domestication, and from 2000 he is involved as senior scientist in feed safety research. Besides the development of microscopical or more generally visual inspection methods, he is also interested in the development of modelling and expert systems.

The principle of evolution in its basic form assumes offspring that is identical to the parent generation in a genetical sense, except for some changes or mutations on which selection procedures are subjected. This principle can be applied to other entities than exclusively living plants and animals. Already in the seventies of the twentieth century he developed interest in wind mills, looking at them as populations of individuals, evolving in the course of time. This interest slumbered in the past decades. Recently he was part of the development team of the expert system Determinator, and started to include a demonstration datamodel on windmills. This renewed interest in windmills resulted in the plan to start an extended study to the variation patterns and their causes in European traditional windmills.