Ralf started his academic career at the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, Germany studying Archaeology, Psychology and Biology. After a year as exchange student at the University of Manchester, UK, he joined the newly established International Max-Planck Research School ‘Molecular Biology’ in Göttingen, Germany, where he received his PhD degree in 2005 studying protein structures using X-ray crystallography. From 2006-2013 he worked at the Genome Institute of Singapore, A*STAR, as a PostDoc and Research Scientist. During this time, he started to engineer stem cell transcription factors (TFs) using structural insights and used genomics and cellular reprogramming to study how they work in a cellular context. In 2013, he moved to the Pearl River delta in southern China to set up his own laboratory at the GIBH and helped to set up the Max Planck-GIBH joint center for regenerative biomedicine. Ralf is interested how TFs ‘translate’ the regulatory code that determines cell states and uses these insights to design artificial TFs that enhance cellular reprogramming.