Dr Florian Schmidt is a postdoctoral researcher in Prof Randall Platt’s group at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE) at ETH Zurich. He obtained his BSc and MSc from the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg, Germany, working on CRISPR/AAV gene therapy. After a short stint in Prof Feng Zhang’s laboratory at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, USA, together with Prof Randall Platt, he transitioned to ETH Zurich, where they established the Record-seq technology used to create living microbial diagnostics.