Prof Sven Panke is a professor of bioprocess engineering. After his PhD at ETH Zurich, he worked for two years in the biocatalysis group of the chemical company DSM (Geleen, The Netherlands). He returned to ETH in 2001 as an assistant professor and moved in 2008 to the newly founded Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering at ETH Zurich in Basel. His main research topics include biocatalyst engineering, high-throughput screening and synthetic biology. He is currently the Head of the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering at ETH Zurich.