Wim Penninx is born in a small village in the south-east of the Netherlands and did an astronomy PhD on radio and X-ray observations of low-mass X-ray binaries in Amsterdam with the assistance prof. Jan van Paradijs (Amsterdam) and Walter Lewin (MIT). About 40 articles were published in scientific journals, including Nature, 1988.

Wim worked for many years as an IT consultant, partly at the Technische Universiteit Delft, which resulted in several Dutch IT-publications and
presentations.

After collecting the genealogy of the Pennings/x-families in the Netherlands, he started to study DNA genealogy in different
contexts. This resulted in a variety of articles and presentations on DNA measurements and history. It started in 2012 on the relation between
population growth and Y-DNA variability in Flanders, Brabant and Limburg at the XXXth Internation Congress of Genealogical and Heraldic Sciences.
Later reports were given on Y-DNA in the Dutch genealogy journal Gen (published by Centraal Bureau Genealogie) and on Regional Endogamy (in a MyHeritage webinar).

Wim created, after an early statistical analysis on Jewish Ashkenazi Y-DNA, the website jewishdna.net. With Rachel Unkefer and J.B. Royal he wrote
an article on the Y-DNA Evidence for an Ashkenazi Lineage's Iberian Origin. In 2016, Wim joined the Avotaynu project.