Poolman pursued studies in Biochemistry and Microbiology at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and the University of Bern (Switzerland), obtaining a MSc degree in 1984. He gained his PhD in 1987 with a thesis on  bioenergetics of streptococci, under the supervision of  Wil Konings and  Hans Veldkamp.
After a brief stint as a scientist at Genencor Inc (now Dupont Industrial Biosciences) in San Francisco (USA), he returned to the Netherlands in the end of 1989 to start his own research group on biochemistry and molecular biology of membrane transport at the University of Groningen, supported by a fellowship from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been professor of biochemistry at the  Groningen since 1998. In 2008 he was appointed Program Director of its Centre for Synthetic Biolog), and in 2013 he became Scientific Director of its Biomolecular Sciences and Biotechnology Institute.
In 1993 Poolman has done a sabbatical at Transgene SA, Strasbourg (France). Thanks to a Fulbright fellowship, he was visiting professor in biochemistry at California Institute of Technology, Pasadena (USA) in 2003.
Poolman has been Chair of the KNAW Earth and Life Sciences Board, and has been vice-chair of KNAW Council for Natural and Technical Sciences since 2017.
From 2016 to 2018, he was a member of the Dutch Council for Physics and Chemistry, and currently he is a member of the core team of the Council for Chemistry.
Since 2009 he led the focus area on ‘Biomolecular and Bioinspired Functionality’ at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials (University of Groningen, together with Nobel laureate Ben Feringa, and, from 2010 to 2017, he managed a national Synthetic Biology program of the University of Groningen.